“Listen to me carefully.”
She saw I was not to be put off. She sat down at the kitchen table and told me she didn’t know why she must hear this. I sat down too. I told her that Ruth Stark had been Edgar’s wife but she had been his model first. He had structured his art around her until disillusion somehow set in. His idealization of her collapsed and he began to develop morbid delusions about her. These spiraled out of control and eventually he murdered her. He then cut her head off and mutilated it. He had shown no insight into why he had done any of this, and no real remorse.
She heard me out in abstracted silence, refusing to look at me. Then she insisted it was all irrelevant as she had no idea where he was, and she had no reason to go and see him, and if that was all I had to say then would I please go now. I told her again that my purpose was to warn her, and would she please take it seriously, whatever else she did; and then I left. She told me later she ran straight upstairs and fell on her bed and wept. She hated me for what I’d just done to her.
She didn’t know how long she lay there weeping. She let it all come flooding out of her, all the anxiety of the last weeks, and now this, the realization that we knew about her. If we knew about her, then she and Edgar were finished: this brought on a fresh wave of despair, and she wept until she was exhausted and empty. Then she started to think. She turned onto her side and told herself it need not be the end after all.
She went to the bathroom and washed her face, then sat at her dressing table and set about repairing the damage. As she did so she told herself again that it need not be the end. If she gave up now, if she didn’t go back to London, then Edgar would be safe but that would be the end. If she waited and did nothing, when she did go back he would be gone. But if she acted now, if she went to him now, then what could we do? Nothing, we could do nothing, if she acted now.
If she acted now. She came back downstairs and went into the drawing room. The house was empty. Max was having lunch in the hospital and Mrs. Bain had gone home. Charlie was at school. She had a drink. If she acted now. She paced the drawing room. The day was cool and there was a light mist on the garden. She could smell the bonfire. If she acted now she would go back upstairs and pack a suitcase and call a car to take her to the station. Then she would go to Horsey Street and not come back.
She had another drink and then she called the car. For a moment or two she stood rooted to the spot as she thought of what would happen to Charlie, and she almost changed her mind. But she didn’t, she pushed the thought away. The car came, and she told the driver to take her to the station. On the way she made him stop at the bank. She withdrew in cash everything in the joint account, a few hundred pounds. At Victoria she felt overwhelmed by the crowd and made her way with some trepidation across the station hall to the cafeteria. She couldn’t get a drink yet so she sat at the back with a cup of coffee and smoked. She was terrified. Then she found herself leaving a coin by the saucer and rising from her chair and gathering her handbag and her suitcase, and in a state of detachment she watched herself make her way out of the cafeteria like any other middle-class lady up from the provinces for an afternoon of shopping, and perhaps the theater later, hence the suitcase, and out of the station to the taxi rank. She told the driver Horsey Street then settled down in the backseat and lit another cigarette and gazed out of the window. Almost immediately the sense of detachment was replaced by exhilaration: there were no further decisions to be made. She had done it, and she felt now what she always felt when a meeting with Edgar was imminent, she felt giddy and glorious and nothing else mattered but that the few minutes separating them cease to drag and start to fly until she was with him again.
Now every traffic light and street obstruction was her enemy. Off to the left she caught a glimpse of the river shining in the sunlight, the mist of the morning burnt off, and on the other side the dome of St. Paul’s. Then they were among the warehouses. Then she was standing at the top of the street with her suitcase and the cab was pulling away.
She walked toward the river, her high heels tapping on the stones. Two boys at the other end of the street were kicking a football against a wall where they’d chalked a target in the outline of a man. She turned up the alley. In the yard a freak wind was blowing, and a few sheets of newspaper were gusting around and around in tight circles just above the ground. A train suddenly rumbled by on the viaduct over the fruit market and startled her.
She went quickly up the stairs to the top floor. The door was locked. She put her suitcase down and knocked. Nobody answered. She called through the door as loudly as she dared. Still nobody came. Now she was alarmed. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might not be here. She knocked again, calling his name more loudly now, and then she sat on her suitcase to wait. Twenty minutes later she heard someone coming up the stairs. There was nowhere to hide. She stood at the top of the staircase. The steps grew louder, a figure appeared on the landing below. To her enormous relief it was Nick.
“Thank God,” she said. “Where is he?”
“You weren’t expected.”
“I didn’t know I’d be coming. Is he in there?”
Nick hammered on the door and shouted to Edgar to open up. Eventually the door was unlocked from the inside and there he was, staring at her. She picked up the suitcase.
“Can I come in?”
His eyes flickered to Nick, then back to her. “You’ve come to stay?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve left him?”
She nodded.
“You’re with us now?”
“I’m with you.”
He produced his big grin, his big wolfy grin, and then he boisterously flung an arm around her neck and together they lurched into the loft and stood there hugging each other in the middle of the floor.
It had of course occurred to me that she might do something like this, but I’d rather thought she would listen to me. I didn’t rightly gauge her level of desperation, nor, I suppose, the extent to which he had ensnared her. So I lose sight of Stella at this point, and have only her own account, offered to me in conversation tentatively and disjointedly, and sometimes emotionally, of the days that followed. One of the first things I asked her was how she imagined we had reacted to her departure. On this point she was both lucid and precise. Max, she said, would have come home from the hospital and not known where she was. Poor Charlie would be back from school by that time of course, though she was trying not to think about the effect on him of all this. Phone calls would be made. Bewilderment would turn to concern, which would then turn to anxiety. At some point in the evening Jack and Max and I would meet and work out what had happened. Max would be unwilling to accept it at first, but as the hours passed and still she didn’t appear he would realize what she’d done to him. She said she didn’t want to think about his state of mind, nor did she want to think about Charlie and how her absence would be explained to him. She had deliberately not considered him when she was packing her suitcase and ordering the car and failing to leave a note. She had tried to blur him into Max, she said, to make him part of the man she was leaving. To think about Charlie’s reaction to her disappearance was clearly much too dangerous. In the morning, awakening to the awareness of what she’d done, she again pushed it away. All that remained of her guilt was a shadowy presence moving behind her lover’s light. She would not look at it, she must ignore it, her happiness depended on that.
What was that first night like?
It was perfect, more than perfect, it was the happiest night of her life. Nick went out for fish and chips and drink and they sat at the table in his kitchen for hours. It felt, she said, as if they’d stolen their happiness, or rather, that they’d come upon it by chance and made off with it, for it really belonged to someone else and they had no right to it. They drank till late and she was elated at the prospect of spending all night there and never having to go back to the hospital again. Nick was part of it, part of their charmed circle; hadn’t he been their friend and helper
from the beginning? And it was his loft, he was sheltering them both now. She liked Nick and he liked her and it was clear that the bleak life the two artists had been leading was about to change for the better. As for Edgar, I could well imagine his satisfaction at this development. He had lured her away from us, he had persuaded her to leave behind all safety and security and follow him underground, where she expected to find freedom. Freedom!
As usual he wasted no time. He knew what he wanted, I believe it was what he had wanted since before the escape, it was what had impelled him to call her so recklessly from London: he wanted to do her head. For he was an artist again, and he was impatient to translate his relationship with Stella, the complex of strong emotion she had aroused in him, into some form of expression. He sketched her for an hour in the studio, and she was fascinated, watching his eyes lifting from the paper, feeling his gaze on her, his impersonal gaze, and hearing the darting pencil scratching at the pad, the grunts and sighs that suggested he was performing a delicate surgical operation rather than making a drawing. She had never seen him properly at work before. She felt she didn’t know him.
Later she looked at what he’d done, and what she saw bewildered her. There were multiple lines, smudged outlines, cross-hatching, whorl marks. She sensed rather than saw herself there. It all seemed so tentative and indefinite, so soft, somehow. She asked him had he always drawn like this. Nick was in the studio, sitting over on the windowsill.
“Have I always drawn like this?”
He glanced across at Nick.
Stella stood at the table, gazing down at the paper, frowning.
“I mean,” she said, “why?”
He came and stood beside her. “Why what?”
“Why don’t you want to do an outline? Am I being very stupid? It’s as if you don’t know who I am.”
“That’s the point,” said Nick.
“What I don’t want,” said Edgar, “is to see you—”
He rubbed his face, irritated at having to put it into words. His hands were smudged with graphite. Some of it came off on his forehead as he pushed his hair, now grown long and shaggy, out of his eyes. He had only the most obscure understanding of why he worked as he did. Curiously, he denied his emotion.
“To see me how?”
“As you see you. As others see you. As a desirable woman, a beautiful woman, I’m not interested in any of that. I don’t want certainty. I just want to get a likeness.”
She didn’t understand.
“As a stranger, then?”
Now he too was frowning at the drawing and impatiently tapping his pencil on the table.
“Not even as a stranger.”
“As an object?”
She rubbed at the smudge on his forehead.
“Inanimate? Unfeeling?”
“No, not inanimate. Just what I see.”
She began to glimpse a meaning here.
“Not what you feel.”
“Not what I feel.”
“And that’s what you call a likeness.”
“That’s what you call the truth,” said Nick.
Edgar looked up sharply. “That’s what you call bollocks,” he said, and the two men shouted with laughter. Edgar stood there grinning at Nick then crossed the room and took his face in his hands and kissed him on the forehead. Nick was absurdly embarrassed and pleased at this display of affection.
This was the pattern of her first days with him. They spent their mornings in bed. Then they’d dress and go down into the loft. She abandoned cosmetics, she wore a head scarf and an old shirt loose over a plain black skirt or slacks. She’d make a meal and they’d eat with Nick in the kitchen. After lunch Edgar would work, and she would sit for him, sometimes for three or four hours at a time. He worked with intense concentration. He told her he wanted to draw her before he modeled her in clay. On the third day he posed her nude from the waist up. He had her stand on a sheet in front of the wall. He was quite matter-of-fact about her nakedness and she affected an equal frankness. Nick wandered in from the other end of the loft and stood there gazing dispassionately at her. It didn’t matter, she supposed. Edgar didn’t notice him until he said something, and then he quietly told him to fuck off. She was strongly aroused by the experience.
When he was finished with her she would sit by herself in the kitchen with her compact mirror, trying to see what he saw. If she wandered back into the studio, either he ignored her and carried on working, or they went to bed.
At night she cooked for them again, or Nick went for fish and chips, and they got drunk together and talked. They talked about everything, but mostly about art.
• • •
After four or five days she became susceptible to sudden gusts of intense anxiety when she awoke to the enormity of what she’d done and the situation she’d placed herself in. This happened early in the morning while Edgar was still asleep. She tried to push it away she hated feeling the idyll disturbed, and she said nothing about it. This will pass, she told herself, they will forget, soon we will be able to slip quietly into the world and go unnoticed. This was all she was capable of, when she tried to think about the future. But most of the time she gave no thought to the larger reality outside. She tried, she said, not to dwell on Charlie, but without success, I suspect.
Housekeeping in the loft was primitive when she arrived. There was much to do and she was glad of it. It was work simply to stay clean, and the two men were less conscientious about it than she was. They only had one sink, one tap, and one lavatory. The sink was often full of paintbrushes. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care if they were dirty, what mattered was that they were together. Her identification with Edgar deepened daily. She told me she deliberately absorbed his tastes, his ideas, his feelings. His indifference to domestic comfort made her feel ashamed of all the years when the provision of domestic comfort for her husband and son had been her sole occupation. She began to write a little when no one was watching her.
She cooked them simple meals on a two-ring stove and made shopping lists and gave them to Nick, who shared the expenses with her. The nights when the three of them sat around the table drinking and talking, those were the best times of all. She was absorbing an entirely new way of thinking and feeling, losing what she thought of as her old, stale identity. Max and the hospital grew more distant with every day that passed.
This, she said, was her period of most rapid growth, for each day she understood more of what it was to think and feel and see as an artist, and the fact that they were fugitives, and that she and Edgar could not go out in daylight for fear of recognition and arrest, this only intensified her intoxication with this new way of being and gave it the flavor of danger that seemed to her intrinsic to the artist’s existence.
• • •
She was astonished to discover that Nick and Edgar had visitors. How could a fugitive from the law have visitors? And yet, on her second or third day in the loft, as the three of them sat in the kitchen at noon eating sardines on toast, they heard a hammering at the door. Stella rose to her feet in dismay, but Edgar only glanced at Nick, who said, “That’s Tony,” and went to let him in.
“Who’s Tony?” she whispered.
“Friend of ours,” said Edgar in an offhand manner, returning to his sardines. Then he looked across the table at her, grinning.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll like him.”
She did like Tony. Like all the men who visited the loft, he was an artist, had unconventional manners, was poor (judging by the state of his clothes), smoked and drank excessively, seemed to take nothing seriously, and was apparently unimpressed that Edgar had escaped from a mental hospital, though fascinated that he’d been followed by the wife of the deputy medical superintendent.
Tony sat with them in the kitchen and was given a plate of sardines on toast, which he ate with his fingers, which he then wiped on his trousers, and the three men gossiped about people whom she’d never met but whose names were becoming familiar throug
h repetition. Singly and in pairs these various characters appeared in the loft over the next few days. All were polite to Stella, whose flight to the city had clearly caught their imagination, and she, after her first spasm of uncertainty as to the wisdom of half of London, so it felt, knowing where Edgar was hiding, soon warmed to these odd, friendly men, so far removed from her experience, and their casual, sloppy ways. But one evening when it was just the three of them drinking in the kitchen she did voice her unease. Nick seemed surprised. It had clearly never occurred to him that Edgar might be betrayed.
“Why would someone want to do a thing like that?” he asked with genuine perplexity.
Edgar shrugged.
Stella thought, If he’s not worried, why should I be?
They began to go out after dark. Edgar was growing restless after the days spent inside, so one night the two of them walked down to the river and gazed out across the water at the towers of Cannon Street and the dome of St. Paul’s. They didn’t yet go into any of the pubs but they felt secure enough out in the dark streets. If anyone came near they slipped into a doorway or an alley and embraced, and this aroused them so strongly at times that they ran unnecessary risks. She says it was starting to frighten her, the way their bodies flared at any contact, however slight. They seemed powerless to control this hunger they had for each other. Edgar slept soundly at night, but she often lay awake for hours in the darkness, staring at the ceiling and listening to the trains rumbling across the viaduct.
She remembers one night hearing Big Ben strike four and turning on her side and watching him sleeping. Who was he? Who was this stranger, her lover? She lit a cigarette. She remembered her first impressions of him, the man in the yellow corduroys mending their conservatory at the end of the vegetable garden. She remembered dancing with him and feeling his erection pressed into her groin, and being excited by his excitement, wanting him because he wanted her. Then the rapid escalation of the affair—the growing terror of exposure—and the escape. Now this. But who was he? From the fragmented episodes of the last weeks she tried to construct a man.
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