Asylum

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “You have no cause to hate Charlie as well,” he said, with no preamble at all.

  They were in the kitchen. She was washing the dishes. He was at the table, turning the pages of the newspaper.

  “Has his teacher been talking to you?” she said.

  “No, why should he?”

  She didn’t believe him but she said nothing, just went back to washing the dishes.

  “Has his teacher been talking to you?” said Max.

  “Not recently.”

  “Then when?”

  “Oh, it’s too tedious. I saw him in the autumn, I don’t know when, before Christmas. He tried to tell me Charlie was unhappy because of me.”

  “But don’t you see how miserable he is?”

  She shrugged.

  “Stella, don’t you see it?”

  She ignored him.

  “Christ!” he said. She turned. He was struggling to keep his temper. “Listen,” he said, “I stay here, with you, for one reason only, and that’s because I think that child needs a mother. But if you never show him any warmth there isn’t much point. Well, is there?”

  She gazed at him silently.

  “Is there?”

  “He’s your son,” she said. “He feels about me as you do, you taught him to.”

  “That’s rubbish.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “My patience is wearing thin,” he said. “For weeks you’ve been like this, no use to me, no use to him.”

  “Our arrangement was I look after the house,” she said.

  “Yes, you look after the house, but you’re never properly in the house, not body and soul. Can’t you get over it? Or don’t get over it, do whatever you want, but why must you take it out on him?”

  “You taught him to hate me.”

  It was then they both realized that Charlie was standing at the bottom of the stairs, pale and bewildered in his pajamas. Max glared at her then crossed the room and took the boy’s hand.

  “Come on,” he said, “upstairs. Time you were in bed, young man.”

  He came down to the kitchen half an hour later.

  “He doesn’t understand,” he said. “He doesn’t know why you’re like this. Talk to him, Stella, for God’s sake. There isn’t much time left.”

  She was far from convinced by any of this and wearily said so. Max went to the window and stared out, his fingers clenching and unclenching in that familiar way. She saw that he couldn’t tolerate this failure; the idea that Charlie was suffering because of his parents’ collapsing marriage embarrassed him acutely. She went upstairs without a word. Charlie’s bedroom door was open. She stood in the doorway. He was lying in bed with his back to her. She knew he was awake and aware of her there, but he wouldn’t turn and face her, and after a moment or two she went into her own bedroom and shut the door.

  The following afternoon she was at the sink peeling potatoes when Charlie came shuffling in from school and dumped his satchel on a chair and sat down to change his shoes.

  “What are we having?” he said.

  “Beef stew.”

  “Mummy.”

  “What is it?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “If you want to.”

  She went on with the potatoes. The window over the sink looked out across the road to the barn where Trevor Williams kept his tractor. There was a window high in the wall that had no glass in it. A crow landed on the sill with a flurry of flapping wings and hopped around two or three times pecking at the sill. Then Trevor Williams emerged from the building. It was twilight, and she was sure he couldn’t see her clearly through the kitchen window, but he put his hand on his groin and rubbed it, and she couldn’t help smiling.

  “Mummy?”

  “What is it?”

  Trevor opened the gate into the field beyond the barn where he’d driven his cattle earlier. She could never understand why he moved them from one field to another, something to do with the grazing, she supposed. He latched the gate after him and set off across the field to where the cattle had gathered at the top end.

  “I want to be friends.”

  She turned from the window, delighted with his plaintive request but pretending to be dubious.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hm. Did Daddy tell you to say that?”

  “No.”

  “Did Mr. Griffin?”

  “No.”

  She sniffed and turned back to the sink and began cutting up potatoes on the draining board. He sat there with a sulky, angry look on his face that she recognized as Max’s. Another long silence as she put the potatoes into a pot and filled the pot with water and salted the water, turning every few seconds to glance at him with mock suspicion. The boy was not sure how much of a game this was. She could hear the cattle out there in the thickening dusk.

  “Turn the light on,” she said, “it’s getting dark in here.”

  She started to chop an onion. No sound from behind her, and no light either.

  “Charlie,” she said, turning, and saw his little face pucker.

  “Oh, darling,” she cried, darting to him and taking him in her arms, “of course I want to be friends! Aren’t we friends already? I thought we were!”

  The next day she stood by the house gazing out across the valley. Another windy day, but dry, with an armada of white clouds moving across the sun so that one hill was lit by a pale watery sunlight while the one beyond was plunged in shadow. It was a restless, active sky, and she watched it contentedly for some minutes. Electricity pylons, recently erected, marched across the valley and climbed in a line across the far hills. When she walked beneath them she heard them buzzing and crackling. The sun was higher in the sky, the first hint of spring, and white smoke poured from the chimneys of the brickworks to the east. For the first time in months she felt something stirring in her that might have been hope.

  That night she suggested to Max that he look for a job in London. She saw the flash of pleasure in his face as he told her he intended to stay at Cledwyn for at least two more years.

  “So you’d better get used to it,” he said.

  That night she got drunk. At times Max’s cruelty cut her deeply, she said. There was a certain thrust of the blade he had perfected by now, one that slipped between the plates of her armor and went right to the heart. He left her feeling a fool that she had momentarily forgotten that this was a mortal struggle, a fight to the death. So after dinner she poured herself a large gin and put her coat on and went outside and leaned against the gate looking at the stars. After a while it was too cold to stay out so she went on drinking in the kitchen, gazing out of the window from a wooden chair tipped back on two legs, her feet up on the sill, the bottle on the floor beside her. The trouble with getting drunk was that it made her think about Edgar and thinking about Edgar made her maudlin. When Max came down to the kitchen she told him he was a shit and he said to her in his quiet, furious voice that his patience was almost exhausted, which provoked a further stream of abuse from her, which quickly sent him back upstairs to his medical journals. Soon enough the tears came but of course nobody came down to see if she was all right, it was just the slut in the kitchen who’d ruined their lives, getting drunk on neat gin and howling for her lost lunatic lover.

  On her way upstairs, after a last expedition out of doors, which culminated in her hammering on the Williamses’ door and shouting for Trevor, she paused in the sitting room. She had the bottle with her and she was tempted to hurl it through the window, just to see Max’s face when he came out of his room, but it wasn’t worth losing the gin for. Laughing boisterously she made her way upstairs and fell asleep in her clothes.

  Max was furious in the morning, so furious she had to apologize. Fortunately she hadn’t announced when she banged on the Williamses’ door in the middle of the night what it was she wanted Trevor for.

  This, she said, was the pattern of their days, in Plas Mold.

  And what of Edg
ar, what of her lost lunatic lover? To my deep consternation I had heard nothing. He seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and more than once it occurred to me that he was dead. I was intensely relieved, then, at last to get word of a reliable sighting: he had been spotted in the vicinity of Euston Station. This suggested the possibility that he was going north, and I immediately called Max. I told him we suspected that he’d found out where he and Stella were living. What he intended to do, if he was indeed heading for Cledwyn, we could only guess. I told him of the security arrangements the police were making, which put his mind somewhat at rest though not much. It was worrying news, and I didn’t hide from him my own unease.

  Then I asked him about Stella. I had talked to her recently on the phone, and I was concerned that she was not being properly looked after. Max was guarded, and when I pushed him, and at last heard the immense weight of suppressed anger in his voice, I tried to suggest gently that he adopt a different perspective, a more detached, more psychiatric perspective. She had suffered a hysterical illness, I told him. She was trying to deal with a huge burden of guilt, and clearly she was having trouble coping. She needed his help.

  He said nothing, and I took his silence for assent.

  I assumed he would tell her what the police had said about Edgar, but I discovered later that he told her nothing. Did his silence issue from some misguided impulse to protect her from distressing news?

  Or was it, rather, cold passive aggression: concealing from her that a man was coming for her who quite possibly intended to murder her?

  A few days later another letter came from Hugh Griffin. She almost threw it away unopened, expecting it to be a further plea that she hug her child more often, or some such nonsense, but she thought of that lanky young man sitting forward on the edge of his chair, peering earnestly at her as he clasped and unclasped his long bony fingers, and she opened it. She was in the kitchen, still in her dressing gown, boiling the kettle to make tea. She’d just washed a pair of stockings and hung them over the back of the chair as she couldn’t be bothered to go out to the line. She sat down and read the letter: no plea for kindness and understanding, however, nor a request for an appointment to “talk things over,” instead an invitation to join a class outing to Cledwyn Heath, a tract of wild land a few miles west of the town. It was part of a class project on local flora and fauna. Her first reaction was negative, though as she drank her tea and gazed out across the valley she thought she might be persuaded to go, if they were nice to her.

  She announced all this at supper that night, and Charlie was excited; clearly he had been pessimistic about his chances of producing a parent for the event. Max, seeing this, also took heart; poor man, she had worn him down badly over the winter, he had been depressed for weeks, though it was as much the job as her, she believed. She knew something of his caseload, she knew that the block he was responsible for housed a high proportion of female schizophrenics, women in middle age or older who had been institutionalized so long there was no real hope of change. There was little there to stimulate a man like Max. He would have liked to run the wards with the younger, more acutely disturbed patients, but John Daniels, the medical superintendent, the man Max had hoped would make the work interesting, had taken those cases for himself. John Daniels is an old friend of mine. Max came too late, he told me; it was as simple as that.

  The situation remained unchanged through the first two weeks of February. The police had no further reports of Edgar, and Max kept to himself the knowledge that he was out there somewhere and quite possibly heading in their direction. The family sustained its delicate explosive equilibrium, lurching somehow from day to day without detonating the enormous destructive energies at its heart. It was hardest on Charlie, of course; he stayed in his bedroom when he couldn’t be outside, and was silent and gloomy at mealtimes.

  Then came news guaranteed to do nothing but exacerbate an already fraught situation: Brenda was coming to visit. Oh, it was with grim foreboding that Max heard this news, which came in a phone call to the hospital one Thursday morning; and it was with sardonic humor that Stella heard it from him that evening.

  “And where will she stay?” she said.

  “She’s booked a room in the Bull.”

  “How appropriate.”

  She could all too easily imagine Brenda’s strategy. She had no intention of allowing her son to waste his life and ruin his career moldering in this damp, forgotten pocket of north Wales, but she knew too that inertia was the enemy, inertia and Stella; these were the forces she must fight, if Max were to shine once more in the psychiatric firmament. All of which obliged her to act, to intervene, to prevent inertia and Stella from dragging him down into a slough of mediocrity from which he would eventually be unable to extricate himself Stella would coarsen him, Brenda told me; that was her great fear. I myself was adamantly opposed to this projected visit, but Brenda’s mind was like a piece of forged steel, once she’d made it up.

  Max would bear the brunt of it, of course. It had been difficult enough in the early days to sustain wife and mother in any sort of harmony. Now, with Brenda so vividly vindicated, when it was clear to all that Stella was a tramp and a slut and an unfit mother, how was he to oppose his mother’s argument that he must leave her, that he must stop making sacrifices she didn’t deserve? Stella watched with secret pleasure as Max grappled with all this. She suggested they give a dinner party.

  “Christ, no!” he cried.

  “Why not?”

  “You know bloody well. Don’t twist the blade.”

  Don’t twist the blade. Was that what she was doing? Charlie at least was happy about the visit; he liked his grandmother, she gave him money and made it clear she adored him. He was all right, in fact he was more animated than they’d seen him for weeks. But not Max. He dreaded this visit.

  One wet Saturday Max and Charlie drove to Chester to meet her train. Apparently the first thing to arouse her displeasure was the state of the car. She hadn’t seen it, of course, since they’d come north, and a winter on farm roads had not been kind to it. Nor apparently was she impressed with Max’s state of mind, and she didn’t have anything good to say about the town either. It was just as well she didn’t come out to the house, Stella reflected, for even in Brenda’s bleakest imaginings she didn’t see a messy kitchen with dirty dishes piled in the sink, stockings draped over the back of a chair, and her daughter-in-law still in her dressing gown at half past eleven in the morning, lacing her tea with gin.

  Her demands were of course immediate and excessive, and Max had never found it easy to say no to her. She wanted him to eat dinner with her every night, and had realized at once there was no decent restaurant in Cledwyn, which meant they had to drive the twelve miles into Chester. She was also eager to see the hospital, and meet the superintendent, and she failed to understand that Max’s position now was very different from what it had been down here. Nevertheless she got her way, and it was arranged that Max would take her to see John Daniels.

  And what of Stella? What of her tear-stained, gin-sodden tramp of a daughter-in-law? Did she want to meet her as well? No she did not, which suited Stella fine, as she had no desire at all to meet Brenda. I wouldn’t have expected Max to be in favor of their meeting either, but here I was wrong. Max had realized (correctly, as it happened, for Brenda took me into her confidence over this) that his mother’s motive in coming to Cledwyn was a divisive one: she hoped that by spending time with her son and grandson, and excluding Stella, she could establish an alternative family structure. She wanted to demonstrate that this alternative family was viable, that she could assume Stella’s place and take care of them, Max and Charlie both. She hinted that she might be prepared to reinstate his allowance.

  Max disliked the suggestion of blackmail, and thought he saw a better way of resolving the situation. He explained it to Stella one evening after supper. His point was, they should seize the opportunity to reverse his mother’s impulse of exclusion and try, now
, to bring them together, all four. It was his last brave, doomed effort to save his family. They would have Brenda to dinner and there would be a reconciliation.

  How queer she found it to hear him say “we.” Why did he still want her? Why didn’t he accept Brenda’s offer, take up the idea of the alternative family and push her out into the darkness? God knows she deserved it, the way she’d been behaving, and God knows he would have a better life under Brenda’s wing than on his wife’s cold breast. But she agreed to do her best.

  Persuading Brenda, Max knew, would not be so easy. During the conversation that I had had with him in January, when I’d heard the suppressed fury in his voice as he talked about Stella, I’d urged him to put aside his own feelings and see that the affair with Edgar Stark and all that followed had occurred because Stella was suffering from a hysterical illness. Therefore she was not entirely culpable. Therefore she needed not punishment but care. Therefore she would get better.

  Max adopted this line with Brenda. It was not a point of view with which she had much sympathy and in her own distinctive idiom she argued the limits of psychiatry. Max to his credit stood firm. He told her that Stella had suffered a nervous breakdown and that she now required patience and understanding. It was a mark of Brenda’s devotion to her son that she too agreed to his proposal. I happen to know she was as skeptical about the outcome as Stella was.

  It was arranged then that Brenda would come to the house for dinner. Forgotten, now, Stella’s disgraceful drunken behavior; forgotten too her bloody-minded carelessness of other people’s feelings, her slovenly ways, her selfish appropriation of the bedroom. No, what mattered now was that she cook dinner and serve it and sustain the appearance of active membership in a functioning if somewhat troubled family. To Max’s great relief she willingly undertook the planning and preparation of the vital meal, she selected a menu and shopped for the ingredients, and this alone, he tried to convince himself, suggested an improved morale, a hint of a possibility of a gradual return to health.