Asylum

by Patrick Mcgrath

  She stood there with the book in her hands and I could see her rolling the question around in her mind as though it were wine of a good vintage. It was a question to be savored without haste. She smiled.

  “Gin and tonic?” I said. “I always have one around this time.”

  “I should love a gin and tonic, Peter.”

  “Good.”

  Nothing was said about the wisdom of giving alcohol to a patient, we behaved as though it were the most natural thing in the world, two civilized people having a drink together in the middle of the afternoon.

  “Sit down,” I said, waving at the chairs ranged in a semicircle around my desk. She settled into a comfortable wing chair upholstered in maroon leather and I sat beside her, and together we gazed out across the terraces at the large sky with its rags and pillows of driven white cloud. Barely were we settled than the phone rang, and I rather irritably agreed to see someone in an hour. I sat back frowning.

  “I shouldn’t have taken the job,” I said. “Running this place is most definitely not my sort of thing at all.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it was,” she said.

  “I’m frankly not very good at it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re perfectly competent,” she said, “but with all the administration you don’t do enough psychiatry. You should, you know.”

  “All the same, I think I might retire.”

  “Peter!”

  “Does that surprise you? I don’t see why I’m not so decrepit that I can’t still write. And decide what to do about my garden, which is starting to look positively Russian. Why not?”

  “But you must have wanted the job when you applied for it.”

  She had begun to sense that all this was leading up to something, some kind of dramatic revelation.

  “Oh, I think everyone understood that I was merely a stopgap. They all assumed that when Jack went Max would take over. He was the obvious choice.”

  A pause; she said nothing.

  “But no, it was not to be,” I said briskly, “so they asked me to look after the place until they could find someone for the long term. I think I’ve given them enough time. If I stay much longer my anxiety will become chronic. Have you been thinking at all about Max?”

  She was willing to talk about Max. She said she wished he could have been direct with her, after Edgar, and told her what he felt. Not behaved in bad faith. Perhaps they could have cleared the air, found a way of living together. Perhaps then Charlie—

  Pause here. Drop the head. Lapse into silence. From me, a sort of sympathetic grunt. It was a lovely spring day, sunny and mild, and there was a cool breeze through the open window. A group of patients tramped along the terrace in yellow corduroys and work boots, their jackets slung over their shoulders. Their voices drifted faintly into the room. On the wall my clock ticked. I was being passive, receptive.

  “Go on,” I murmured.

  “Oh, I don’t know what I feel now. I wish he’d never met me. Have you talked to Brenda?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Still deeply distressed, as you can imagine. She’s under the care of her own doctor.”

  “How she must hate me.”

  “I don’t think so. She’ll survive, as you will. Tragedy isn’t as rare a feature of life as we sometimes imagine.”

  She managed a small smile. “I’m glad the outlook isn’t too bleak.”

  That small smile told me that now was the moment. I am past sixty. I shall retire soon. I have fifteen good years left, with luck, and I do not want to spend them alone. It had occurred to me some days earlier that after she left the hospital Stella should come and live with me. There were many advantages to such an arrangement, from my point of view. She was a cultured, beautiful woman. She understood how I lived and would find such an existence agreeable. Art, travel, gardening, and books, these were the interests we shared. She would bring light and grace into my quiet house and my measured life. I could see her in those elegant rooms. I felt I could share them with her. We would talk, I would come to know her. Understand her affair with Edgar.

  She, in turn, would find comfort with me. Safety. Asylum. I said this to her.

  “Asylum?”

  She was astonished. She stood up and walked to the far end of the room, leaned against the wall and looked at me as I sat there still gazing out of the window with my back to her. One thing emerged clearly enough from the turmoil and she said it.

  “But I’m still married to Max!”

  Now I turned in my chair.

  “I’ve been to see Max,” I said. “He’ll let you go.”

  “Oh, he will.”

  I nodded.

  Suddenly she found it all hilarious. A romantic proposition from the medical superintendent, with her husband’s complicity, what an afternoon she was having. She felt like a consignment of damaged but retrievable womanhood, in the process of being transferred from old owner to new, after being stored for a while in a warehouse. She put her hand over her mouth and stared at me as the laughter silently swept through her and made her shoulders shake. She didn’t stop until I led her back to her chair, where she clutched my jacket and pressed her face into my shoulder. After a moment or two she brought herself under control. She let go of my jacket and made use of a handkerchief I produced from my breast pocket. She patted her hair then reached for her drink.

  “I must look a sight. Please don’t sedate me.”

  “You don’t want anything?”

  “I don’t need it.”

  She was working with her compact and lipstick, repairing the damage.

  “I must say,” she murmured, peering at her face in the little mirror, “you’ve an unusual way of delivering bad news.”

  “This is bad news?”

  “I mean Max. Letting me go.”

  She pronounced the words with heavy irony.

  “I know you don’t love me,” I said, “but I think you need me, you do at the moment anyway. I’d be prepared to gamble on that changing. Your affection for me deepening.”

  Another silence.

  I sensed her pity then. The poor man, I imagined her thinking. She smiled slightly. She wasn’t taking me altogether seriously. But she behaved herself. She turned her glass in her fingers and gazed at it from lowered eyes as the sun caught the crystal facets and threw off tiny splinters of light. She lifted her eyebrows. She knew I was watching her.

  “Are you a very passionate man, Peter?” she murmured.

  “I think perhaps that’s something we would have to discover,” I said gently. I put a faint stress on the “we.” I was telling her there would be nothing she didn’t choose. She became aware that I was still talking.

  “What?”

  “You can imagine it, then?” I said.

  She wandered down to the bookcase and ran a finger along the spines. I am the woman of sorrows, said her back, I am deep water, I am grief, my soul is torn and bleeding, will you touch the wound? A small silence. He won’t do it, she told herself, he won’t tear me open; and I didn’t. I let the silence continue as she returned to her chair. At last she spoke.

  “You’d be taking on rather an injured bird, you know.”

  “I’m good with injured birds.”

  “If I married you—”

  Oh, and my face, she said, was suddenly suffused with tenderness! What a delightful sight it was, and what good it did her, to see that tenderness! She smiled and put her hand on mine where it lay on the desk. Her eyes searched my face, absorbing every last flickering ember of feeling she had aroused in me.

  “When would we do it?”

  “July.”

  “I won’t be here?”

  I shook my head.

  “It would be quiet, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, it would be quiet.”

  Now she gazed at me with a look that said, If only it were so simple. I read the thought.

  “It’s perfectly easy.”

  She pressed my hand.


  “Dear Peter,” she said, though I suspect she was still thinking, Poor Peter. She sank back into her chair.

  “I think,” she said, “I’d like to go back to the ward now.”

  “Of course.”

  The woman of sorrows followed her routines and kept to herself her astonishing proposal from the medical superintendent. It occurred to her to tell the ladies on the ward, just to see their reaction, but she could guess what they’d say. Marrying the superintendent? Of course you are, dear. And I’m the bride of Christ. My proposal had amused her at first, but I knew she would soon make a complicated calculation of self-interest. and I was confident she would see marriage to me as her best course. I was placing a heavy burden on her, given everything else she was having to deal with, but I believed she was strong enough now to bear it. She was still reluctant to tell me about her dreams but I drew her out without too much difficulty. I knew that just talking them through would bring about the discharge of that first painful freight of guilty feelings.

  The screaming child of course was Charlie. When at last she talked about him she said she was aware of forces at work in her that tried to defend her from him, but he was too strong, he came through despite everything. She would sit up in bed with her hands clasped to her face and her mind clearing, but not fast enough to prevent her seeing his fading image, and in one particular recurring dream he gazed back at her and said in a voice she knew so well, his serious voice, the voice that had always been accompanied by a funny little frown, that voice clearly saying, Mummy, can’t you see I’m drowning?

  Those words! They lingered on into the morning, as she followed the fixed routines of ward life, as she washed and dressed and walked down corridors with the other women to the dining room. It was the hardest time of the day, she said, those first hours, when she had to maintain an outward poise and a pretense of serenity as inwardly she reeled from that small, serious voice. Mummy, can’t you see I’m drowning? Of course, my precious darling, of course I can see it, I’m coming to help you, don’t panic, darling love, Mummy will help you, Mummy won’t let you drown! But who did she cry this out to, who could hear her? Nobody; her voice echoed as though trapped in a vault full of shadows, and no answering presence, no warm familiar companion emerging from the darkness to take her hands and comfort her, tell her it was all right, it was only a dream. She may have been awake but it wasn’t all right because it wasn’t only a dream. Charlie was dead but he lived on in her, crying out in his panicky failure to understand why she wasn’t helping him.

  She became deeply upset, telling me this, and I comforted her. I have met this before, I told her. Charlie is dead, I said, and we can’t bring him back, but I can help you. I can relieve this suffering. You are not alone anymore. She said she dreaded going to sleep now, she felt as though she were about to descend a ladder into a cellar where she would meet only horror. This was what the night began to mean to her, a passage into horror. Its shadow lengthened, it clung on longer and longer in the morning, filling the first hours of the day with its foul psychic aftertaste—

  Oh, it was a subtle game she played with me. She never saw me in the morning, that was when I attended to my many administrative duties. It wasn’t until after lunch that I saw patients, and she freely admitted to me that by that time the voice had faded and her composure was far less precarious. So we talked more calmly about Charlie, and she played down how bad it was, and allowed me to see that she was playing it down, before we moved on to more pleasant discussions about our marriage. Our marriage. It was an idea that clearly still amused her, she smiled whenever I mentioned it, as though I’d made a particularly good joke. Our friendship, at least before all this, had often involved the making of good jokes. This was the best joke of all, though I seemed to be in earnest. I know she had always assumed I was homosexual. Now she must have thought, Perhaps he is, and what he’s proposing is more a domestic arrangement with therapeutic implications than a marriage as such. She pictured my house and my garden and I think that even without intending to she began to yearn for it, for it meant peace and sophistication and comfort, and what else did she want? Suddenly she wanted the life I was offering her.

  My only concern now was that she not change her mind! I became for the first time in many years troubled with a mild insecurity. I imagined her thinking, Peter every day. Peter at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day. Under the same roof, sharing the same rooms, every day. But then I reassured myself, and imagined her realizing that I would surely make daily life a cultivated, amusing affair, for she knew she need not fear some ghastly revelation of grubby habits, petty cruelties, unforeseen rigidities; she knew I was in no sense a shabby man. No, she could live with me. She was less sure about sleeping with me. In that department one was invariably surprised, and rarely pleasantly—

  She led me to believe that she could fulfill my expectations of marriage. She led me to believe she could make me happy, and in the process provide herself at least a modicum of contentment, it would not be difficult given the kind of man I was and what I possessed. Comfort makes for decency, she said. She and I both knew what happened to love in squalid surroundings: that love had burned, but oh, with what a ragged, restless flame! Love like that could never be contained by the sort of life she and I contemplated, it was an inferno compared to the small mild lick of civilized warmth she and I intended to nurse. But I thought we were in tacit agreement by now that those large emotions by their very nature tend to blaze freely and then die, having destroyed everything that fed them. In any case it was over now, all that. Or so she led me to believe.

  She asked me to increase her nightly medication and I saw how appalled she was when I suggested that she might be better off without any sedation at all, that by suppressing her dreaming she was blocking unconscious material that could usefully be exploited as she came to terms with Charlie’s death. I saw the effort it cost her to bite back the exclamation, Nothing is suppressed! Instead she said that her memories were so much with her during the day, she could at least be allowed to forget while she slept.

  “As you wish,” I said. I did not pursue it, I did not force her. I was not too worried, although of course in retrospect I should have been. But I didn’t see just what a difficult performance she was sustaining, in the teeth of an intense and unremitting pain the precise nature of which I had not guessed at; all I saw was guilt. I decided not to increase her nightly medication. I told her she was on quite a high enough dosage as it was.

  • • •

  I didn’t see her for several days. July I had told her; it was now late May. Five or six weeks. She followed her routines, dressing carefully in the morning, visiting the hospital library, taking her book down to the dayroom and reading there by the window unless one of the women wanted to talk to her. She remained composed, distant, courteous, sad.

  There is a certain special way people behave toward a patient who is soon to leave the hospital. It’s as though she’s become something between a patient and a free woman, neither the one thing nor the other. There’s an air of quiet celebration, for a patient released is a credit to the staff and cause for hope for other patients. Stella had been in the hospital only a short time but she had diligently maintained her poise and earned general respect. People wished her well and asked her what her plans were. She said she would be living in London with her sister’s family. They must have wondered why none of her sister’s family had ever come to visit her but nobody said anything. She didn’t ask me if I’d told the people at the Home Office about this impending marriage.

  Meanwhile she was escorted to my office every afternoon, and for an hour in that large comfortable room she and I would discuss our plans, which soon evolved from the extremely quiet wedding to the honeymoon in Italy, where I intended to show her Florence, which I know well, and Venice, which I know less well. We would travel in late September, we decided, when the weather was mellow and the tourists had gone home. Then we would come back and settle down to a
life of civilized companionship. I told her one afternoon that marriage was held to be the answer to the problem of sex, but that I rather thought that marriage, at least as we conceived it, would instead be the answer to the problem of conversation.

  And did the prospect of this companionable marriage make her happy, did it promise to answer for her too the problem of conversation? I thought it did, I thought that was what was going on as she sat on the bench overlooking the terraces, wearing her somber clothes and her air of melancholy resignation, and making her heart’s calculations.

  • • •

  I continued to look after the hospital, chairing meetings and dealing with paperwork in the morning, attending to my caseload after lunch. Contemplating the prospect of imminent retirement, I began to prepare my patients for my departure. Only one gave me real cause for concern, and this was Edgar. For of course he was in the hospital, I’d seen to that, where else could he go? He’d come to us soon after being picked up in Chester, on his way to Stella, though whether to carry her off or murder her I had not yet been able to establish. I was holding him in a room on the top ward of the Refractory Block, by himself, which may seem punitive but was not.

  We have some details of his movements after Stella left Horsey Street, not many, though I hope soon to have more. He returned to the loft and stayed on for three days by himself, working without rest on the head. On the fourth day someone apparently came to see him, we don’t know who, and told him that the police were on their way. He fled with a few clothes and books stuffed into a duffel bag, and ironically it was only a few minutes after he had gone, and the police had arrived, that Stella made her appearance. All the contents of the studio were impounded, and I was later invited to come and see if any of it could shed light on the whereabouts of my patient. What most intrigued me was the art he’d made while Stella was there, the batch of drawings and the head itself, all of which he’d left behind.

  He then disappears, absorbed, we think, by an underground network of artists and criminals who sheltered and fed him in the following weeks. We believe he moved constantly, from studio to studio, flat to flat, and I have a mental picture of this big, bearded man in a workman’s jacket with the collar turned up and his cap pulled low, appearing at people’s doors in the middle of the night and being made welcome; though I imagine the wives were uneasy. One report had him in Cornwall, living in a remote cottage near the sea, but my own hunch is that he stayed in London, where he knew his way around. Until, that is, he decided to go north and look for Stella. As for Nick, he was taken in for questioning and then let go with a caution. His father was a judge.