Asylum

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “Thank God.”

  She leaned against the wall and felt its soft warmth through her blouse. There was no question of resisting temptation. She was lost. His large hands were splayed on the wall on either side of her head and he was leaning forward, his face close to hers. She gazed coolly into his eyes, though her thoughts were far from cool. She took hold of his shirt and gripped it tight.

  “Have you been thinking about me?”

  He nodded. She pulled his face to hers and as they kissed his hand moved from her breast to her hip to her groin.

  “Not here,” she whispered.

  He stepped back as she pushed herself off the wall. She paused beneath the arch in the wall and turned to him where he stood in front of the conservatory, wiping his fingers on a rag and watching her intently. She crossed the meadow to the copse of pines on the far side. She saw no one. She wandered among the trees and then lay down in the ferns. The sun streamed through the branches and she lifted her hand to shade her face.

  She was waiting for him, her blouse unbuttoned, when she heard the voices. She sat up. She couldn’t make out what they were saying but they were men’s voices and they were coming from the meadow. She held her breath. She realized what was happening. He had met John Archer coming across the meadow. They were talking in the meadow while twenty yards away she sat hidden in the trees. After a few moments she was seized by a bizarre impulse, she wanted to laugh, to shout out with wild joy at the sheer comic indignity of her position, for she couldn’t help imagining Max’s reaction, what he would say at seeing his wife hiding in the woods, half undressed, denied her furtive few moments of pleasure with Edgar Stark because an attendant had unwittingly intercepted the man on his way to their tryst.

  The voices died away soon after. She slipped out of the woods and ran across the drive to the house. She went upstairs and ran a bath. She was still a little giddy when she came back down to the drawing room and poured herself a drink. She sat in an armchair with a book, her drink in hand, and lit a rare cigarette.

  Her reaction astonished her. That she should want to laugh—what did this mean? In the full knowledge of the consequences of discovery, to laugh was to say she didn’t care what happened to her! This was her interpretation. I suggested that instead it might be connected with anger.

  What anger?

  Anger with Max. It seemed clear to me, I said, that her behavior was linked to a desire to hurt Max.

  She shook her head. I don’t think so, Peter, she said. But there was, as I suspected, a massive reservoir of resentment in her. She was not ready to talk about it yet, and I didn’t force her. It would come.

  Assignation, this was the next stage. Establishing the times and places, giving the thing a structure. What made it so difficult, of course, was the fact that Edgar enjoyed such limited freedom of movement. But despite the constraints they did find the times and places, one always does; they had their assignations.

  The day after Edgar was intercepted by John Archer they met by the conservatory and she told him they ought to get organized.

  He was at his workbench. There was a long pause.

  “You want to go on with it then?” he said at last.

  She was sitting on the bench in the shade of the wall. She was wearing her straw hat and sunglasses. She lifted her head and nodded. He seemed to sway slightly, and then turned back to his work. “Archer,” he murmured.

  She had a basket with her and had tossed some flowers into it. She stood up and set off back down the path toward the house. John Archer came toward her, his boots crunching on the gravel. She made a conscious effort to behave naturally.

  “Good morning, Mr. Archer. Lovely tomatoes you’re giving us. Nice and sweet.”

  He nodded affably and said something about summer salads. Stella wondered what there was in that steady gaze that put her on her guard. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps only her own guilty conscience. He had a way of waiting for one to speak, of creating a silence that must be filled, and such men made her uneasy at the best of times.

  She was right to be uneasy. John Archer reported to me, and he had sharp eyes and a devious mind, every bit as devious as Edgar’s; he soon let me know about this budding friendship. Perhaps I was wrong, but I decided to do nothing about it. I was curious. Edgar had had no contact with a woman for five years.

  The staff cricket field is a broad stretch of level ground fringed with pines and bordered on one side by the estate road where it passes the Raphaels’ garden on its way up to the Main Gate. Beyond the trees on the hospital side a back road runs down the hill close to the Wall, winding past the chaplain’s house, then out across the marsh. Just above this road, looking out over the cricket field and shaded by the pines, stands the pavilion. It is a graceful old wooden building with a shingled roof and a weathercock. It has a shady veranda at the front, where we sit to watch the cricket, and inside, a cool and gloomy club room with a bar.

  That summer there was always a party of patients at work in the garden of the chaplain’s house, for like Max the chaplain had embarked on a number of projects including the construction of a greenhouse. Edgar was the best carpenter we had on an outside work party, and was often needed. He moved unescorted between the two gardens, and the cricket pavilion lay close to the path he took down the hill. Stella had keys to the building, being a member of the cricket committee.

  So they had their place of assignation.

  She did have moments of sanity when she looked dispassionately at what she was doing. She describes how she drifted out onto the back lawn one evening and wandered in the moonlight over to the goldfish pond. She sat on the edge and watched the fat vague silvery shapes gliding among the lilies in the black water, and thought with a smile of Charlie’s water snakes. She gazed at the light from the drawing room as it spilled out through the French windows onto the lawn, and above it, in darkness, the open windows of Charlie’s room, the curtains stirring slightly in the breeze. She was moved suddenly by the idea of the security of her family life, its comfort and meaning and order, all of which rested squarely on Charlie and his welfare. Then she thought about this dawning adventure of hers, and it was suddenly vividly apparent to her that by indulging it she was putting that order in jeopardy. She felt then a powerful tremor of apprehension.

  The feeling stayed with her for several days and precluded any further developments. But she could not be still. One morning she went down the drive and across the road to the cricket field. It was another clear hot day; two patients in floppy white hats, and with their shirts tied around their waists, were sweating in the sunshine out in the middle of the field as they pushed the big roller back and forth. Unseen, she hoped, deep in the pines at the edge of the field, she walked around the side to the pavilion. There was an empty shed at the back where the big roller was garaged, and in the darkness she smelled fresh-cut grass and soil. She found what she was looking for, a narrow window at the back of the pavilion that could be reached from the roof of the shed.

  She came around to the front and darted up the wooden steps to the veranda. The two patients were hazy in the sunlight and there was no attendant in sight. She turned to the door of the pavilion and unlocked it.

  Inside, deck chairs were stacked against the wall. A single shaft of sunshine penetrated the gloom, lighting a patch of floorboards marked with hundreds of tiny dimpled indentations where over the years cricketers in their studded boots had stamped out from the changing room at the back. She found cushions and blankets in the storeroom and spread them on the floor. It was as she stood there gazing down at this crude bed that she felt a sudden astonishment at what she was doing: she was planning to bring a man here for sex. And not just any man, a patient. Your patient, Peter. She fled the place, locking the door behind her, and returned to the house, where she found Mrs. Bain at work in the kitchen.

  That day and the next she didn’t go near the vegetable garden, though she could hear him out there hammering and sawing. At last a reaction had set in, a
slow, horrified recoil, first aroused, she said, the night she’d sat at the edge of the goldfish pond and was affected by the warmth and security the house had seemed to offer. This reaction was slow to appear because drawn from deep in her psyche, so that by the time it rose to consciousness it had grown massive and was experienced not as apprehension but as horror. Horror at the very thought of endangering not only her own security but Charlie’s too; it seemed then cruelly irresponsible to put at risk the boy’s happiness.

  How quiet he could be at times, she remembers thinking when he came home that afternoon. She was eager to be with him, guilty for the thoughts she’d been thinking in the pavilion that morning, as though, she said, she’d been unfaithful to him. Perhaps that’s the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else’s happiness? It’s not the blunt fact of the thing, it’s all in the effect it would have if known. The thing itself is insignificant. She agreed with me, in principle. But none of that was relevant anymore. Now the point was to guarantee utter secrecy. This was what preoccupied her as she sat on the back lawn in the shade of the ash tree, and Charlie lay on his front on the grass in the sunshine nearby, propped on his elbows and frowning at a book with his hair flopping over his eyes. As though he sensed her thoughts he suddenly looked up.

  “Mummy.”

  “Yes, darling!”

  He then produced an extraordinary physical contortion, as though he were thinking with his whole body and the thought was a complicated one. He rolled half over onto his side and stared up at the sky, one plump arm pulled around the back of his neck, his hand clutching his chin, the other lifted straight up, fingers splayed against the sun.

  “I’ve thought of a joke,” he said.

  “Well?”

  “Ask me why I fell out of the apple tree that day.”

  “Why did you fall out of the apple tree that day?”

  “Because I was ripe!”

  “Very funny.”

  She couldn’t stay away from him. She tried. She had had her moment of horror when she confronted the implications of what she was doing, but the effects were short-lived. Knowing how close he was she couldn’t control the constant restless excitability of her imagination. The next morning, after Max had gone up to the hospital, she crossed the backyard to the gate in the wall.

  It happened again, that extraordinary feeling she could only think of as intoxication. He was at the far end, down by the conservatory, where he had set up a sawhorse on trestles beside his workbench, and he was hard at it, pushing the saw with a strong, easy stroke. He heard her when she was halfway along the path, and he turned and watched her approach.

  “Go on with your work,” she called quietly as she came closer. “Don’t stop for me.”

  But he didn’t go on with his work. He fished his tobacco tin out of his trouser pocket, sat down on the bench by the wall, and rolled a cigarette. She sat down beside him.

  “I’ve been over to the pavilion,” she said.

  “I know.” His tone was sardonic.

  “How do you know?”

  “One of the men saw you.”

  She should have been alarmed by this but she wasn’t.

  “Can you come this afternoon?” she said.

  He paused a moment, faintly smiling as he licked the edge of the cigarette paper. He enjoyed the urgency he had aroused in this pale passionate woman. She saw it, and touched his face.

  “Can you?” she murmured.

  “Yes.”

  She tried not to show him how the excitement mounted within her as this conversation went forward. She felt the fabric of his corduroy trousers against her bare leg. It was stupid to take risks in the vegetable garden but she kissed him anyway.

  That afternoon they met in the cricket pavilion. They undressed each other, they lay down together, but all she would say about the sex was that it was effortless, and mutually intense; she had never known anything like it, this vigorous physical struggle their bodies took to with such immediacy and force. Afterward he took some whisky, and this worried her slightly, it seemed an unnecessary risk. He had a flat metal flask in his pocket and he filled it from a bottle behind the bar.

  “Suppose they miss it?”

  He crossed the room and knelt down beside her where she sat soft and flushed and disheveled on their makeshift bed. He took her face in his hands and kissed her.

  She saw him as her charming rogue. She couldn’t argue with him. She couldn’t oppose him at all, it wasn’t possible, for she had begun to surrender herself and no longer felt distinct and separate from him, rather that she was incomplete without him. She understood what was happening, she was falling in love, and she didn’t want to stop it. She said she couldn’t stop it. She acquiesced in his stealing from the pavilion; she assumed his own attitude of disregard of risk, and rationalized it. A few days later, when he asked her for money, she gave him everything in her purse.

  No control. You don’t control falling in love, she said, you can’t. At the time it had amused her that it should happen like this, with this man. A patient. A patient working in the vegetable garden. Stella, I said, you could not have chosen more unwisely had you tried. But the truth is, she said, I didn’t choose.

  She functioned as normally as she could at home but she was never properly there. Her day became focused on that one point in time when she waited with rising excitement in the gloom of the cricket pavilion, waited to hear his boots on the wall as he clambered onto the roof of the shed, then heaved himself over the windowsill and dropped to the floor inside. He would come toward her, grinning, where she waited, ready for him, on the blankets, and sink down with her, and she lost herself completely when she reached for him and felt his strong hands on her body. Oh, she loved him.

  Perhaps.

  I believe now that the visit that summer of Max’s mother, Brenda Raphael, in a curious way accelerated the progress of the thing. One Friday afternoon in early August, five or six weeks after the dance, she arrived at the deputy medical superintendent’s house while I was there. I had left the hospital early and dropped in on Stella on my way home. I had recently heard from John Archer about her budding friendship with Edgar, and naturally I wanted to talk to her. I had no chance to bring it up, however, for she at once told me her mother-in-law was expected.

  “I offered to meet her at the station,” she said as she led me down the hall and into the drawing room, “but oh no, she didn’t want to put me to any trouble. She makes it sound as though I’m so stagnant it would be dangerous to move me.”

  We had a drink in the garden, and she was distant, distracted. At the time I did not associate her mood with the faint sounds of shattering glass and hammering that drifted in the still air from the direction of the vegetable garden. Five minutes later we heard a car in the drive. Together we went down the hall to the open front door just as the taxi driver brought up the first of Brenda’s numerous suitcases; she herself was just emerging from the back of the car. She was an urbane, autocratic woman, and she was also wealthy. I happened to know she was helping Max and Stella maintain their standard of living here, and that their car—a white Jaguar, of all things—had been her gift when Max was appointed deputy superintendent. She and I often spoke on the telephone. We understood each other. She relied on me for reports about her son.

  She handed the driver his fare and tip with all the graciousness of royalty. “Peter,” she then said, “how nice to see you. Stella, my dear. You seem well.” They kissed, and Brenda advanced along the hall. She was, as always, fashionably dressed, and I knew this caused Stella a pang of envy not to be living in London still, not to be generating this same aura of chic.

  “Would you like to go upstairs,” said Stella, “or shall we have a drink and take it into the garden?”

  “That would be lovely,” said Brenda. “Now, Peter, don’t run away just because I’ve come. Where is Charlie?”

  “I expect he’s out in the marsh,” s
aid Stella, “or down by the conservatory.”

  Brenda lifted a thin, plucked eyebrow. “He might have been here to say hello to his grandmother, but that’s a boy for you. I don’t think Max was very different. How is Max?”

  As she said this she sank into one of the armchairs, crossing her elegant legs, and took her cigarettes out of her handbag.

  “Busy,” said Stella. “Happy, I think. He likes it here.”

  “I was rather afraid he would. Max is a cautious man, I’m sure I don’t need to tell either of you that. He’d be drawn to the security of a job here.”

  “I think he wants to be medical superintendent. Don’t you agree, Peter?”

  I was pouring the drinks, with my back to the women. I stiffened slightly at this unpleasant suggestion and murmured some demurral.

  “You don’t want to stay here, of course,” said Brenda, and as I handed them their drinks I saw again how things were with them: Brenda was not a woman’s woman, but she and Stella had worked out certain unspoken compromises over the years. Now, it seemed, at least on this issue, they were allies. Neither of them wanted to see Max bury himself in this provincial institution.

  “Oh, I could tolerate it for a couple of years,” said Stella, giving me a private smile as I handed her a gin and tonic, “but I’m afraid it’s more than a couple of years Max wants. Shall we go into the garden?

  “It’s the attention he gives the garden that worries me,” she went on, when we were settled in wicker chairs in the shade, and again I was struck by how distracted she was. We gazed out over the back lawn. The goldfish pond sparkled in the sunlight.

  “A garden takes years to do properly and Max is working on this one as though he’ll be at it for the rest of his life.”

  “How worrying.” Brenda glanced at me, but I was sustaining a studious neutrality here.

  “He’s having the old conservatory fixed up now.”

  It was the second time she’d mentioned the conservatory.

  “I do hope you’re wrong about this,” said Brenda. “But tell me, my dear, how are you? You certainly look well. In the pink, I’d say.”