Asylum

by Patrick Mcgrath

  She decided to give them kidneys.

  It was a fiasco. Max picked Brenda up at the hotel and brought her to the house. She couldn’t disguise her horror at how they lived. She picked her way across the yard with an expression of disgust on her face, for Trevor Williams had been spreading manure for several days and the yard was running with it, the air was thick with it. She entered the kitchen, gave Charlie a kiss and greeted Stella in a tone of coolness inflected faintly with sympathy, this clearly for Max’s benefit, as he had continued to work the theme of her “illness,” her “breakdown.” Stella was in an old shabby dress with an apron tied around her waist. Max suggested they have a drink in the sitting room, and Brenda allowed herself to be taken upstairs.

  She insisted on seeing over the whole of the house, and was shocked at their sleeping arrangements. Max had failed to prepare her for the shared bedroom. That her son, a highly qualified psychiatrist, should have to live like a schoolboy—! When Stella followed them upstairs she found Brenda perched uncomfortably on the couch as if it carried contagious disease. She gazed at Stella helplessly; Stella had never seen her at a loss for words before.

  “My dear,” she managed at last, “I had no idea Welsh housing was so primitive.”

  Stella laughed gaily. “Yes, we were very spoilt down south with all those big rooms. We have to make do like everybody else now.”

  “So I see.”

  Max was alert for toxins in the air. He intervened adroitly.

  “We’re not uncomfortable,” he murmured; “there are many worse places we could be living.”

  “Oh?” said Brenda. She clearly found this difficult to believe.

  “Oh yes,” said Max. “The Welsh are a burrowing people, they like dark houses tucked away under hills, or deep in the woods. They like gloom. This house isn’t gloomy.”

  An eyebrow rose a millimeter on Brenda’s marble forehead. It was the index of a deepening skepticism.

  “John Daniels was telling me,” said Max, “that depressive illness is significantly more prevalent in this part of Wales than anywhere else in Europe. Except Scandinavia, of course.”

  He had just made this up, Stella could tell by the way he said it. It showed how desperate he was.

  “I wasn’t impressed with John Daniels,” said Brenda. “Where did he learn his psychiatry?”

  “Edinburgh.”

  “You surprise me.”

  They then began discussing departments of psychiatry in various British universities, and Stella left them to it. She went downstairs to see to the kidneys and refill her glass from a fresh bottle.

  By the time she called them down to eat she had finished that bottle and started on another. God knows I’ll need it tonight, she told herself. The problem was of course that while drink subdued anxiety it also destroyed inhibition; after three or four glasses she became what Max, she told me wryly called “disinhibited.” She was disinhibited as she served them leek-and-potato soup.

  “Not what you’re used to, Brenda,” she said, “but needs must when the devil drives.”

  “Regional cuisine can be surprising, don’t you think?” Brenda spread her napkin in her lap. She lifted her spoon. “Well,” she said hopefully, “this looks hearty.”

  Stella served herself last and then sat down, untying her apron and tossing it in the general direction of the pegs on the wall by the door.

  “It can,” she said, “if you can afford the ingredients. Not that there’s much available in these parts. Anyway, on Max’s salary it’s a struggle just to put food on the table.”

  “You’re exaggerating, darling,” said Max.

  “Cold mutton sandwiches I give them,” said Stella. “On Sundays we have cabbage. For a treat.”

  She looked at Charlie, and he was wriggling on his chair and grinning. He thought it was funny.

  “You’re being facetious, my dear,” said Brenda smoothly. “But I take your point. One is often limited by the availability of local ingredients. When Max’s father and I were traveling in Spain in the forties we often dined on a bowl of garlic and a loaf of bread. There was nothing else to be had.”

  “Fancy,” said Stella. She had been trying to make the point that they were poor, and here they were talking about bowls of Spanish garlic. Max took the opportunity to tell his mother that all the good histories of Spain were written by Englishmen, and Stella couldn’t tell if he was making this up as well.

  “Isn’t that interesting,” said Brenda.

  “Fill our glasses, please, Max,” said Stella. “If you drink enough you won’t notice what you’re eating. Collect the plates, please, Charlie.”

  She rose and busied herself at the stove.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever eaten in a kitchen, have you, Brenda?” she said without turning. “It’s how the other half lives.”

  “Charles and I were often in straitened circumstances in the early years,” she said.

  “Hard to imagine,” said Stella, and turned with the casserole to see Brenda glance at Max and hear her quietly sigh. The dinner was not going as Max had hoped it would.

  It didn’t improve. There wasn’t an argument as such, rather a series of snarls in the thread of the evening, small disruptions of the flow of talk Max was working so hard to promote. Stella was responsible of course, being disinhibited, and even felt disappointed by the end that she hadn’t provoked Brenda to a good bitchy hiss. But the older woman wisely wanted no part of her manipulations.

  “Good night, my dear,” she said when Max was ready to drive her back to the Bull. “I hope you feel better soon.”

  With that she climbed into the car.

  Max returned in a fury an hour later and found Stella further disinhibited. He stormed the length of the kitchen to the window and stood there staring out and bristling. She was still at the table among the dirty plates, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes.

  “Not only are you selfish,” he said, his voice low and hoarse with anger, “you are also stupid.”

  She put her elbows on the table and held her glass in front of her face and gazed at him over the rim and said nothing.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  “What have I done, Max?”

  She expected him to tell her she had destroyed any chance of Brenda ever giving them money. But he surprised her.

  “You’ve squandered the last of your resources.” His voice had become suddenly quiet.

  She did not enter into the melodramatic spirit of the moment.

  “The last of my resources,” she said. “What’s that?”

  He smirked bitterly. There was a brief silence. Then she snorted.

  “What does that mean, Max?”

  “It means you’re on your own.”

  “I’ve always been on my own.”

  “Oh no you haven’t. You’ve never been on your own. I’m going to bed.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  She was on her feet by this time. She didn’t like all this ponderous finality. She stood by the table and seized his sleeve as he tried to get past her to the stairs. He stared at her with a fury colder than any she’d seen in him before.

  “Let me go,” he said.

  She gripped his sleeve harder, got a bunch of material in her fist, and grinned at him.

  “Let me go!”

  He jerked free of her and lost his balance slightly. He stumbled and reached for the banister.

  “You’re disinhibited!” she shouted.

  He went up the stairs.

  “What sort of crap is this, Max?” she shouted. “What do you mean, I’m on my own? I’ve always been on my own, married to you!”

  He came back down a few steps.

  “Just shut up now, will you? We’ll discuss the details in the morning, but I don’t want you waking Charlie.”

  “What details?”

  They stood there glaring at each other, him halfway up the stairs but half turned to face her where she stood at the
bottom. She saw Charlie first, on the landing rubbing his eyes and frowning.

  “Sorry, darling, did we wake you?” she said. “Daddy’s just pretending to be a bloody fool.”

  Max darted up the stairs. “Come on, you,” she heard him say, “back to bed,” and the pair of them disappeared. Stella returned to the kitchen table and finished whatever she could find. When Max came back down he bluntly told her the news he had kept from her all day. He told her that Edgar Stark was in police custody. He’d been picked up that morning. In Chester.

  They were holding him there.

  The next couple of days felt unreal. She buried her response to the news about Edgar and channeled the affect into fury at being paraded in front of Brenda to show off her mental health so the old bag would start giving Max money again. Max was quieter than she’d ever known him. Such was the ferocity of the rows they’d been having that apparently he felt there was no longer any future for the marriage. He abandoned the psychiatric perspective, and who can blame him? He tried to talk to her about separation but she wouldn’t listen, she walked out of the room.

  “This won’t go away,” he said.

  But she wasn’t going to have an argument like that with him. And as he wouldn’t talk about it while Charlie was in the house she was able to evade the discussion he so eagerly wanted about the details.

  Not a happy household. Each time she went out she half expected to come back and find the locks changed. She talked to Trevor Williams about it and saw a queer glint come into his eye. Let him try it, he said. He told her nobody could change the locks on the house but him, which put her mind at rest to some extent. Somehow the forms of family life persisted. She didn’t give up the housework and the cooking no matter how great the gulf grew, there was a sort of comfort in them that had nothing to do with anybody else, it was to do with her, to do with sustaining a structure to the day, a sense of order that she seemed to need more than ever, what else did she have? Silence and hatred, misery and futility, these things she could tolerate, not disorder. Not chaos. Not a dirty house and unplanned meals.

  For she was holding on by her fingertips now. Waves of despair came without warning, and at these times she just wanted to lie down and die, but she was holding on, she wouldn’t let go, she wouldn’t surrender to it, not yet, though it gnawed at what small reserves of willpower she had left. And this shaky refusal to give up was what forced her through the routines of the day, making the beds and doing the laundry and cooking the dinner. It wasn’t for them that she did these things, but herself. She clung to housework to save her sanity.

  They sat down each evening to a silent meal and afterward Max and Charlie might go for a walk if it was dry. Stella cleared up and washed the dishes. She had another drink and sat at the window and watched the fading light, for it didn’t get dark so early anymore. In three hours I will be asleep, she told herself, and another day will be over without me going mad. It was beginning to feel like an accomplishment, getting through the day without going mad. She didn’t think about the future, thinking about the future only makes sense if you want something. She didn’t want anything now but to get to the end of the day without going mad.

  He was in Chester! Twelve miles away.

  In police custody.

  All lost. There could be no more fantasy of flight and escape. It all collapsed then, the entire structure. And it’s at this point I think we can say that Stella sinks into clinical depression proper.

  One night they sat at supper and Charlie was agitated. He kept glancing at Max, and Stella guessed he wanted him to say something to her.

  “Well, what is it?” she said eventually. “Why don’t you tell me yourself?”

  He cast a stricken look at Max, who sighed and dabbed at his lips with his napkin.

  “Charlie’s worried you’ve forgotten his class outing tomorrow.”

  “Are you still going to come?”

  She stood up and went to the sink and put her plate on the draining board and leaned against the counter with her back to them. Through the window over the sink she could just see the sky to the west, lacy islands of cloud drifting into the sinking sun and a glow of the palest orange imaginable. A few seconds went by. She felt the blackness rising in her.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  The bus came at half past nine. Charlie was pathetically grateful that his mother was going with him. She had had a bad night and in the morning regretted agreeing to this outing, but she didn’t relish the prospect of staying by herself in the house. In better days, she thought, she would have asked Max to prescribe her something, after all there has to be some advantage to living with a psychiatrist; but then in better days she wouldn’t have needed it. So she drank her coffee and smoked her cigarettes and Charlie packed his satchel, telling her about the pleasures awaiting them. She reflected on the child’s ability to live in the present and be so seemingly unmarked by the unhappiness around him. There she sat, hollow-eyed and silent, the black hole in the heart of the family, the one responsible for destroying the joy of his childhood, and yet in the excitement of a day out together it was all forgotten, all that mattered was that he would board the bus with his mother, and the fact that she was a bitter, depressed woman who had shown him sparse tenderness or affection for weeks, this was forgotten.

  They got on the bus and her heart sank as the eyes of two dozen Welsh schoolchildren and half a dozen adults watched them make their way down to the last empty seats at the back. Hugh Griffin, sitting by the driver, made friendly noises, but his was the only voice in that silent bus which did. Stella realized then that Charlie’s unhappiness had locked him out of this community as effectively as hers had, and she felt a dull sense of confirmation, she felt she might have known, this is the nature of people, they unerringly select as their victim the one who most needs their warmth. They were outsiders, Charlie and she, and they sat quietly at the back of the bus, and slowly the murmuring of the adults resumed, the babble and cries of the children, as mother and son gazed out of the window at the foreign fields.

  Cledwyn Heath was a barren tract of rolling upland and their bus labored as it climbed up out of the valley and onto the plateau. For miles around a desolate landscape of moss and bracken stretched in all directions with here and there a stunted tree hardy enough to sustain its bent and twisted outline against the wind. Deep fissures came into view, sudden gulleys that plunged away steeply from the road and formed steep pockets in which stagnant water pooled, these pools overhung with clumps of weeds and low trees in whose shadow the water looked black and thick and evil. Stella hated it, there was an atmosphere of violence about this lonely moor, and she was not the only one who sensed it, the rest of them fell silent and all that could be heard for a while was the wind. Eventually they pulled off the road and parked in a sheltered spot near some woods and as the children left the bus their voices rose again, and then Hugh Griffin was organizing them into groups and arranging where and when they would meet for lunch. Charlie and Stella were part of a group that was to follow a track around the eastern rim of the heath. Apparently they would come upon a prospect a clear sixty miles to the sea. They set off, mother and son bringing up the rear of the party, and another parent, a father who had hiked in the area, leading them.

  Her feeling of unease deepened as she tramped along in her Wellington boots, her raincoat tightly belted and a head scarf knotted under her chin. The track was narrow and stony and the climb was steeper than it first appeared. There was low cloud overhead and the sky threatened rain. Already the others had disappeared from view, and they seemed now the only living creatures in this bleak place where hillocks and heather spread on all sides, rising and falling, and no structure, no tree even to break the empty vista of land and lowering sky. Charlie marched on ahead of Stella, his satchel bumping up and down on his back and his head moving from side to side so as to miss nothing, turning now and then to make sure his mother was keeping up, eager pleasure in his lonely little face. She felt the
blackness rising in her again and wished she’d stayed at home, this was no place for her, these empty wastes, among unfriendly strangers, pushing against the harsh damp wind. By the time they reached the prospect of the sea she was struggling hard to keep going for there were forces at work in her mind that would have her sink to the ground with her arms over her head and never rise again. The father tried to talk to her but she had no conversation for him, she was beyond that.

  They tramped on and eventually found themselves at the picnic site, a sheltered spot in the lee of a hill. On a low flat outcrop of rock Hugh Griffin and the others had begun to spread their sandwiches and drinks. The children were forming into small noisy groups while the adults gathered around Hugh Griffin and poured hot tea from thermos flasks. There was laughter and shouting as a sudden gust of wind lifted a map from the rock and blew it away. Stella wandered a little way off by herself and a minute or two later was aware of Charlie beside her silently eating his sandwiches. He asked her if she was hungry and she shook her head. He asked her if she wanted to see what was on the other side of the hill and she said yes. Soon they were out of sight of the others. Charlie made his way down the steep slope to the pool at the bottom, where weeds grew thickly in the shallows. Stella followed him and settled herself on the ground some way back. She felt the first spots of rain. Charlie shouted that he thought there were newts. Stella let her head fall forward onto her knees and covered her face with her hands. This time it was very bad. Black waves swept through her. The ground seemed to be undulating beneath her. She lifted her head and the air was misted with a fine black dust like specks of graphite. It was starting to rain. She saw as though from a great distance and through a heavy scrim the dark pool, its surface running with little waves and splattered with raindrops, and Charlie splashing indistinctly among the dense weeds at the edge. She pulled out her cigarettes and lit one, cupping her hand around the lighter’s flame. Charlie was trying to catch something in the shallows but it evaded him. She watched him mutely and passively and smoked her cigarette as he grabbed it, whatever it was, and lost his balance. The air was dark and the rain was coming harder now and the awful undulation had almost stopped and she felt the creeping numbness that always came afterward. Charlie was in deeper water now, trying to scramble upright and flailing around and shouting, and something in his shouting brought her to her feet. She stood in the gusting wind and rain with her shoulders hunched up tight and watched him for a few moments. Then she turned her head to the side and brought the cigarette to her lips. The edges of her head scarf fluttered wildly about her face; the waves were almost gone. She turned back and dimly saw a head break the surface, and an arm claw the air, then go under again, and she turned aside and again brought the cigarette to her lips. With one hand she clutched her elbow as her arm rose straight and rigid to her mouth. She turned her head to the side and again brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, each movement tight, separate, and controlled.