Asylum

by Patrick Mcgrath

  I glanced at her. In the pink. I rather whimsically reflected that it sounded like a euphemism, something to do with sex; and it was then that it occurred to me that something was happening to Stella, sexually. I regarded her with care.

  “I’m having a lazy summer,” she said in an offhand manner. “I don’t really have a great deal to do, even though it’s such a big house. Mrs. Bain comes in in the mornings and I can usually leave it all to her.” She brushed at a wasp that was buzzing around her glass.

  Brenda then began to talk about her social life in London, and this litany of lunches and cocktail parties and formal dinners was accompanied by the usual weary complaints at how much in demand one was, and how tired one got, and how few people appreciated how precious one’s time was. As Stella listened to this, murmuring that a smart, busy London social life was about the closest thing to heaven she could imagine, I wondered idly with whom she might be having sex, but could think of no likely candidates on the estate.

  “You must come up to town more often,” Brenda was saying. “Everybody asks how you both are. Spend the night. We’ll go to the theater and have supper afterward.”

  “We will, soon.”

  They talked about Charlie then, and a little later Brenda went in to wash her face and have a rest before Max came home from the hospital.

  I made my own departure shortly afterward, but not before Stella had told me in a fierce whisper that she could expect nothing but torment like this for the next few days, and how was she going to cope without going mad? I was sympathetic. I managed to make her laugh. She slipped her arm in mine as we walked around the side of the house to where I’d left the car at the end of the drive. “Peter,” she said.

  Her tone was casual, dreamy even. “Yes, my dear?”

  “When is Edgar Stark getting out?”

  It wasn’t so unusual a question, but it gave me a shock. I told her it would be a long time if it had anything to do with me. “Why do you ask?” I said as we reached my car.

  “No reason. He’s the one doing Max’s conservatory. Will we see you on Tuesday night?”

  “Yes, you will,” I said, as I kissed her cheek.

  My Edgar?

  When the professional staff leave the hospital at the end of the day the place assumes a different atmosphere, rather like a town by the sea when the season is over and the tourists go home. I like it then. Over the years it has become my practice to return to my office in the stillness of the evening and reflect in tranquillity on the events of the day.

  “Back again, Dr. Cleave,” says the attendant at the Main Gate as I collect my keys.

  “Back again,” I say. With the custodial staff I have always projected a sort of patrician affability. They like it. They like structure and hierarchy. They know me well. I have been here longer than any of them.

  My office had a good view of the country beyond the Wall. It was particularly lovely on summer evenings, when the last of the light brought a soft, hazy glow to the marsh, and over to the west the setting sun turned the sky all shades of red. One day some months after Edgar was admitted to the hospital I returned to my office at this quiet hour. I poured myself a drink—I keep a small stock of alcohol in my desk, under lock and key—and stood a few moments gazing out of the window. I remember it so well because it was in the course of a session with Edgar earlier in the day that he first began to reveal the full extent of his delusions, and dropped all pretense that the murder had been as impulsive as he’d first maintained.

  I had been to see him during the afternoon in the dayroom of his ward in Block 3. This is a large, sunny room with a well-waxed floor and a snooker table in the middle. There were couches and armchairs upholstered in a tough dark-green vinyl, and a large table at one end where men played cards or read the newspaper. A television set had recently been installed at the other end. He was playing snooker, bent over his cue, about to take his shot, when someone whispered to him that Dr. Cleave was here. He made his shot.

  “Oh yes?” he said, straightening up. He turned, grinning, toward the door.

  I mouthed the word “Come.”

  We had spent almost an hour in the interview room, and I had taped our conversation. He’d told me first about his promotion to the downstairs ward in Block 3. I had been instrumental in arranging this, of course, but he needed to take the credit and have me applaud him, as a child might. This is not uncommon, the projection by the patient onto his psychiatrist of the feelings of a child toward its father. Such transference of affect can be useful, as it was in Edgar’s case, for bringing to the surface repressed material.

  When he settled down I turned the machine on. At this point my understanding of his personality was not extensive. He had told me something of his reasons for killing his wife, and what I’d heard was quite fantastic. There is often a ghostly resemblance to logic in the thinking of delusional patients, and it was apparent here. Driven by morbid unconscious processes to suppose that his wife was betraying him with another man, he had reasoned, first, that they must have ways of signaling their arrangements, and second, that their activities must leave traces. He had then manufactured evidence of such signals and traces from incidents as banal as her opening a window just as a motorbike was going past in the street below, and from phenomena as insignificant as a crease in a pillow or a stain on a skirt.

  I asked him, as I did at the beginning of every interview, if he still believed he had been sexually betrayed.

  “Oh yes.”

  This was said with utter assurance. He was rolling a cigarette, his eyes on his fingers. He nodded several times.

  “How long had it been going on?”

  He looked up and glanced out of the window, gathering his thoughts. A slight frown as he touched the edge of the cigarette paper with his tongue. He looked eminently reasonable and sane. I saw him come to the decision to be frank with me at last.

  “Eight or nine years.”

  His expression said, Now you understand everything.

  “But that’s how long you’d been married!”

  He nodded, genuine sadness in his face.

  “When did you first suspect it was going on?”

  “I knew from the beginning.”

  “Are you saying that throughout your marriage you knew your wife was being unfaithful to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “With the same man?”

  “No. There were others.”

  “How many?”

  His face came suddenly to life. He was bitterly amused.

  “How many? Hundreds. I lost count.”

  “And you did nothing about it?”

  “I pleaded with her. Threatened her. I don’t think it was her fault. She wasn’t responsible.”

  He began pushing his hands through his hair.

  “It did no good?”

  “She laughed at me.”

  “I see.”

  I allowed a silence. The reports I’d read indicated that the marriage had been relatively stable until a year before the murder. Were they wrong? Was Ruth Stark promiscuous? Had he been plaguing her with accusations all along?

  “Did anyone know about your unhappiness?”

  He nodded. He gave off the air of a man forced to make a difficult admission, one harmful not to himself but to another.

  “Who knew?”

  “Various people.”

  “Friends? Family?”

  He nodded again. I now knew that what I was hearing was all a product of the delusional structure.

  “So she was sleeping around with a lot of men from the start of the marriage. You knew this, you talked to her about it, but she paid no attention.”

  His eyes flared with a sort of astonished incredulity.

  “She laughed at me!”

  “She laughed at you. And others knew what was going on.”

  “I didn’t have to tell them. They could see for themselves.”

  “And she didn’t care.”

  “It was her work,” h
e said. “She was a whore.”

  This was new. “Go on.”

  “She brought them to the studio while I was out. I’d see them waiting in the street, hanging about till I was out of the way. She could do ten or twelve a day. She couldn’t help it.”

  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 hos
pital 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.