Stella shook her head. She wanted to say it was outrageous but all she could seem to manage was a shake of the head. Take care, love, the woman whispered. She squeezed Stella’s hand and disappeared into her room.
Her life on the ward quickly fell into a pattern of meals, medication, time spent in the dayroom, and time spent locked up. I came to see her several times and told her not to worry, that we would start talking properly very soon. For the time being, I said, I just wanted to settle her down.
Settle me down. She felt like a squalling infant, she told me later.
As the days passed she began to lose the feeling that she didn’t belong here, though whenever she noticed this she made a conscious effort of will to resist the idea. I do not belong here, she told herself, though she had no idea anymore where she did belong. But she no longer saw the other women as so very mad or strange or different from herself. She began to understand how they had ended up here, and it was often through a bizarre chain of events, not unlike the events of her own life, culminating in some sort of public humiliation. The woman who’d said she’d been brought in with just the clothes she stood up in, this woman told Stella her name was Sarah Bentley and that she’d been married to a man who beat her whenever he was drinking, which was three or four times a week. When she couldn’t take any more of it she told him she’d kill him if he ever laid hands on her again. He promised he wouldn’t but two months later he came home drunk and hit her and then passed out on the couch. She stabbed him in the throat with the kitchen scissors, cut him open, cut his heart out, and flushed it down the toilet. Then she went to bed. The police were at the door in the morning and when they took her away all the women who lived on the street gathered to watch her go. She said some of them cheered her and some of them jeered. Nobody could understand why she’d flushed his heart down the toilet, she said, but it was obvious to her. She didn’t want the bastard coming back.
Then she asked Stella what she’d done, and Stella had barely begun to attempt to formulate an answer when she was overwhelmed by the unutterable horror of it all. They were in the dayroom, sitting by the window, and Sarah tried to calm her down but it did no good and a few minutes later she was locked in her room, sedated but still weeping.
I went to see her the next day. I sat at the end of the bed nodding as she told me about the wave of horror that had welled up inside her. I told her this was natural, this was to be expected, she would have to go through a certain amount of grief before we could move on to anything else; it was good this process had started, I said. I told her I wasn’t going to increase her medication, but that I would make sure the ward staff knew what was going on.
The next time I saw her I asked her if she was ready to tell me what had happened, from the beginning.
“What is the beginning?” she said.
“Edgar?”
Her head came up and she gazed at me with an expression I found difficult to read precisely. Pain, apprehension, even dread, all this and something else too, what I now believe to be a dawning awareness of the new nature of our relationship. Nothing was simple anymore. I was the doctor, she the patient. We were on opposite sides. She required a strategy.
But of course we had to start with Edgar. Stella had come to us because she’d stood by and watched her child drown, but the pathology there was straightforward. The literature on maternal filicide is not large but it is clear: usually an extended suicide, the removal of the child from a situation the mother finds intolerable, though in Stella’s case complicated by the projection onto the child of the intense hostility she felt toward its father; a classic Medea complex. Recovery involved, first, guidance through an initial intense period of suffering whose main feature would be guilt; then acceptance of the trauma; then the integration of the trauma into memory and identity. Routine psychiatry. No, from a clinical point of view her relationship with Edgar was far more intriguing, in fact it was one of the most florid and dramatic examples of morbid obsessional sexual compulsion I had encountered in many years of practice. Consider: what she had seen in the water, in extremis, was not Charlie, not even Max. It was Edgar.
Now that I had her here in the female wing I relished the prospect of stripping away her defenses and opening her up, seeing what that psyche of hers really looked like. I understood of course that she would resist me, but we had time.
I thought it a good sign when she began to worry about her appearance once more. She said that now that she was invariably dressed in the gray cardigan, blue blouse, gray skirt, gray stockings, and black laced shoes that we issued to the patients in the female wing, she was acutely aware of how smartly I dressed by comparison! Each time before she saw me she went down to the office at the front of the ward and asked to use the cosmetics tin. This was an old biscuit tin filled with a clutter of lipsticks and eye pencils, little vials of perfume, jars of cream and powder, all donated by members of staff and shared by the women on the ward for important occasions such as a visit from the doctor. Seated at the table in the front office with a compact mirror propped in front of her, she did the best she could with what she had, then combed her hair and mentally apologized to me for so dismally failing to meet my own high standards. She went back down to the dayroom to wait, and the other women complimented her in a sisterly way on how she looked.
There was a small conference room next to the office and that’s where we had our first proper talk. I asked her how she was feeling, and then we started. I gazed at her with my fingertips pressed together and resting on my top lip. My eyes, she said later, seemed to bore into her soul like a pair of skewers.
“Peter, what are you doing? You make me feel like a specimen! God knows I don’t bear scrutiny these days. Why must you dress us like nuns?”
How long it had been since she’d even tried to talk like this, flippant and smart, the way she and I used to talk all the time! For a fleeting moment she was a pale shadow of her old self, a woman at ease with an old friend.
“We have a lot to get through,” I said. “It’s going to be painful for you.”
She busied herself getting a cigarette alight. She tried to sustain the brief flare of gaiety but I’m afraid it collapsed in the face of my gravity.
“Let’s talk about Edgar. Tell me about the first time you seriously entertained the idea of having sex with him.”
This was blunt, but I intended it to be so. She dropped her eyes and played with the cigarette packet, carefully aligning it with the edge of the table. Her voice was wary.
“Oh God, I don’t know. The first time?”
I nodded.
“In the vegetable garden,” she said quietly. I watched as the experience gradually assumed shape and definition once more. “Go on.”
In her mind’s eye she relived the moment in the garden, in the sunshine, when she knew it was inevitable that they have sex because it was impossible not to. It was just not possible not to. Not thinkable. Risk was no deterrent, when the impossibility of avoiding or deferring or ignoring the necessity became apparent. She tried to explain this to me.
“It was a necessity?”
“Yes.”
“And you think he shared your sense of necessity? Despite the risks?”
“Oh yes.”
“Why?”
She shrugged slightly. “I could tell. I knew.”
“Is it conceivable that Edgar was using you because he planned to abscond all along?”
“No.”
“All right. Did it live up to your expectations?”
She tried to make a joke of it. “You want the details, Peter? The grope and fumble in the undergrowth?”
“You found a place in the garden.”
“Yes, at first. The conservatory.”
I ignored the distaste in her voice as she tossed me this gobbet of information.
“And then?”
“The pavilion.”
“Ah, the pavilion.” I sat back. “I’m sorry, my dear, I don’t embarrass you for my own plea
sure. Was Max really so unsatisfactory?”
“I suppose he must have been or it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Why not?”
“I’d have thought you could only fall in love with someone if you weren’t already in love with someone else.”
“You weren’t in love with Max. But did you love him?”
She gazed blankly at me.
“You’ve never been married, have you?” she said at last.
“Were you frustrated?”
A bark of laughter. “Isn’t everyone?”
I waited.
“Oh, Peter, I don’t know what to tell you. I rather admired Max in the early days. I wanted us to go back to London, but that was our only real argument. I wasn’t craving excitement, if that’s what you mean.”
“A normal marriage, then?”
“I suppose so.”
“A husband, a home, a child, reasonable contentment. Yet you jeopardized it all for a sexual relationship with a patient.”
“That sort of calculation didn’t come into it.”
“Was it exhilarating to think that your whole way of life was at risk?”
I sat now, an elbow propped on the table, projecting an expression of warm, frank curiosity.
“I’d fallen in love, that’s what exhilarated me,” she said.
There was a silence.
“This love,” I said, “this feeling over which you had no control. What is it exactly?”
Another silence. Then, wearily: “If you don’t know I can’t tell you.”
“There’s no defining it, then? No discussion possible? It springs to life, it can’t be ignored, and it tears people’s lives apart. But we can’t say more. It just is.”
“Words,” she murmured.
“Words perhaps,” I said briskly, “but what else do we have? Let me ask you to consider a possibility: that this love of yours was just a blind for something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the effects of it. You abandon everything. You cultivate disdain for a man you’ve grown used to—”
I paused; she had started quietly to cry. I gave her a handkerchief. I could see she hated herself for exhibiting feminine frailty. If I rejected her, she said later, if I despised her, if I condemned her, then she had nothing. She was nothing. I recognized all this.
“All right, that’s enough,” I said gently, and we talked of other things. But before I went away I asked her to think about what it meant, to love. Be rigorous, I said.
She said she would.
She told me later that our talk left her confused and anxious. She returned to the routines of the ward with great unease. She was silent and preoccupied in the dayroom. She tried to work out what I was doing. I had deliberately upset her: why? It must be a way of testing her, of seeing how strong she was. And she had done rather poorly, caving in like that. I had shown her how fragile she had become, I had held up a mirror and let her see her weakness. This was good psychiatry, she supposed: I didn’t tell her to be strong, I led her instead to want to be strong.
It took her several days to work this out, she said. It occurred to her to be grateful that she was in so protected a place, that she was safe here, and in wise, healing hands. She tentatively began to think of herself in a new way. Restricted since Cledwyn to a tiny cluster of superficial selfish concerns, and numbed lest she think of Charlie, she now opened herself, just a little, to the extent that she accepted that she was damaged and needed help. She looked to me to give her that help, and when it was time to see me again she mustered as much courage as she was capable of and came in with a brave smile, apparently eager to go further but, as I immediately detected, inwardly terrified at the prospect. I came around the table and pulled out her chair.
“Don’t be so anxious,” I said quietly, pushing the chair in as she sat down. I put my hand on her shoulder.
My fingers rested on her shoulder for several seconds and I could feel her intense awareness of the contact, for an electricity was there. I sat down and asked her how she was doing on the ward, and she managed once more to be almost her old self, witty and ironical, and she made me smile as she described her eccentric community. The mood shifted abruptly, however, when I pressed my fingers to my lips and allowed a certain contemplative expression to steal across my features.
“Have you thought about what I asked you to?” I said.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Peter.”
“Describe Edgar physically.”
She said she’d been afraid of this. She said that when she deliberately aroused the memory of him it felt as though a screen had been interposed between herself and his image. I reminded her that it was Edgar she’d seen struggling in the water that day on Cledwyn Heath, and I told her this strongly suggested to me that she was desperate to let him go, to bring the pain of her compulsion to an end; it is a stage we see in all such relationships, I said, craving the death of the lover. I wanted to know how far this process had advanced, to what extent the affair was really over.
We talked about him for almost an hour. After she’d made a halting description came questions that were much harder to answer, questions of feeling. She found herself telling me that for the first time in her life she’d desired someone with a physical and emotional intensity she had never experienced before, directly, but only sensed in men, coming from men. I nodded as she spoke, I encouraged her when she faltered, and somehow she found words for the chaos of feelings she had known in the few weeks she was with him. She told me how they conducted the affair on the estate, and what happened when she was in London with him. I was curious that she made no sort of moral judgment of him, not when he absconded without telling her, not even when he hit her.
“Why not?” I said.
She didn’t know. She said the question seemed all wrong. In order to criticize him she would have had to see him conditionally: I love you unless you do this. It simply didn’t arise.
“You accepted him without reserve?”
“I suppose I did.”
“Even when he hit you.”
“I know why he did it.”
“If I told you he was in the hospital now, what would your reaction be?”
I was watching her closely. I saw something flare briefly to life in her eyes; then she shrugged. She said it hadn’t occurred to her that he would have been brought back here, though once she thought about it it was obvious. Though it didn’t matter now. When she said this I regarded her with what she called that rather frightening detachment that made her feel like a specimen on a slide.
“It doesn’t matter?”
“It’s finished, Peter. It finished when Charlie died.”
She lifted her head and met my gaze squarely. I wanted to believe her, but at the same time I knew that she knew that this was what I wanted to hear her say. I tested her again.
“The question was hypothetical, Stella. He’s not here.”
Again that almost imperceptible flare of feeling.
“I’m glad,” she said.
It takes a few weeks to tidy up someone who comes to us in as bad shape as Stella was, but we did it. The ward reports came to my desk every morning, and I watched her gradually taking an interest in the world once more, narrow and circumscribed though that world was. She was still avoiding dealing with Charlie’s death and I felt no need to rush her. I was concerned, however, about the effect my question about Edgar might have had on her. I was afraid I had inadvertently disrupted the transference I wanted to effect, the displacement of whatever feelings she still harbored toward Edgar, to me, her doctor. For it was essential that she now see me as her sole source of support.
During the next days she became noticeably more alert. Mary Flynn, who’d seen her when she was first admitted, told her it was grand to see her coming along so well. She was more talkative than we’d known her so far. She became interested in hospital gossip, she wanted to know more about this community to which she now belonged. She bega
n to spend as much time in the dayroom as she could, which we tend to regard as a good sign. Her brief identification with the other women, with Sarah Bentley in particular, she gradually abandoned. Sarah was subversive, she liked to mock the attendants and upset ward routines, she failed to hide her contempt for her situation and her belief that she should not be here. I killed the bastard because I hated him, she told Stella. He hurt me. That doesn’t make me crazy. I should be in jail. Then at least I’d know when I was getting out.
Sarah could talk like this all morning, and Stella saw now that friendship with her was a liability. She tried to explain to her that here you had to be diplomatic. You had to understand what was expected of you. Sarah refused to see this. As far as she was concerned they were all goons and she had no intention of keeping quiet about it. Stella thought this a mistake. There were times, she told her, when you should keep quiet. Sadly she saw that she and Sarah could no longer be friends.
She asked to work in the laundry.
“You?” I said, in an amused tone of voice, concealing my suspicions. “Now, why on earth would you want to work in the laundry?”
“Oh, Peter,” she said, “of course I don’t actually want to work in the laundry but I’m bored stiff up here. Can’t you find me something to do?”
“You are coming along nicely,” I said dryly. “You’d perhaps like to go downstairs.”
She gave me a frank smile. “I don’t really think I belong up here,” she said, “do you?”
I was vague. She knew I didn’t altogether trust the improvement she seemed to be showing. She could see me wondering, behind what she called my silky disquisitions, if it was a false recovery I was seeing, one that presaged collapse into a depression deeper than the first.
“Do you think about Charlie?” I said.
“Yes.”
“And?”
A quiet tone of voice now. “I’m coming to terms with it.”
Now the frown, the fingertips pressed together against the top lip, as I gazed at her. A silence. We were in the conference room at the end of the ward, it was April, and through the bars the branches on the chestnut tree were covered with pale buds. The day was warm, and from the corridor came all the usual sounds, keys turning in locks, a murmur of voices, the muffled cry of Rooms, ladies! The clatter of a mop in a pail. The smell of bleach. In the silent room off the front office I pondered the pale woman sitting across the table from me. Then I rose abruptly to my feet.
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