Asylum

by Patrick Mcgrath

  It was April when Edgar was readmitted to the hospital, and since then he had consistently refused to speak to me. I had no wish to leave him languishing in the Refractory Block, but he gave me no choice. It was frankly a nuisance. I needed to give him a thorough psychiatric evaluation and recommend a treatment strategy before passing him on to a new man. I knew he would come around eventually, I’d waited for tougher characters than Edgar, and they’d all softened in the end; but now I didn’t have time. So I told him of my engagement to Stella, and I did not employ delicacy. I was blunt, and I was aggressive. I wanted to force a reaction.

  We were in a side room off the office at the front of the ward, a bare cell with walls painted green, a single barred window, a heavy, battered table, and a pair of wooden chairs. He was bent over the table, idly fingering a cigarette, rolling it back and forth. He was wearing a hospital shirt and hospital trousers, no belt, no shoelaces. His hair was cropped and the beard had gone. He had lost weight, and he had lost confidence too. He looked young, and oddly vulnerable, like a big unhappy child. I watched him closely. I wanted him not only to start talking to me again, but to give me an indication of his present feelings toward Stella, for I wasn’t yet certain why precisely he’d tracked her to Chester. He slowly sat up, and I saw the emotion shift across his features like wind on water, bitterness, amusement, skepticism.

  “You?”

  It was the first thing he’d said to me since his return.

  I nodded. But he would not rise to the bait.

  “What do you feel about that?”

  He shrugged, shaking his head slightly. I sensed the struggle in him.

  “I heard what happened,” he said.

  I allowed a small silence. Then: “I think she deserves a little happiness, given what she’s been through,” I said, “don’t you?”

  There was a sardonic twist to his lips.

  “Answer the question, Edgar.”

  Now he bit.

  “You answer the question, Peter. The question is, What would she want with an old queen like you?”

  I concealed my satisfaction.

  “You resent it, then? The idea she could love someone else.”

  “She wants to get out of here.”

  I paused. Naturally it had occurred to me too.

  “So you still love her.”

  “She’s an animal.”

  This I had not been expecting.

  “How so?” I murmured.

  “You don’t know her at all, do you?”

  “You do?”

  He didn’t answer. He’d hunched over the table again, not meeting my eye, gazing at the unlit cigarette as he rolled it about.

  “Should I remind you what you do to women when you think you know them?”

  I sat across from this murderer as he straightened up in his chair and left the cigarette alone. There was an attendant just outside the door, in case he went for me.

  He had cut Ruth Stark’s head off and stuck it on his sculpture stand. Then he’d worked it with his tools as though it were a lump of damp clay. The eyes went first. One of the policemen told me it was like something out of a butcher’s shop. You wouldn’t know what it was, but for the teeth, and a few clumps of matted hair.

  It could have been Stella. It very nearly was.

  That evening I returned to my office when the hospital was quiet to ponder our talk. He had expressed only cynicism and contempt toward Stella, but I was not convinced. Edgar was a complicated man, and he was more than usually adept at concealing his true state of mind. I considered it quite possible for him to call Stella an animal but think her a goddess: he had no reason to be honest with me, considering I not only controlled his fate but was about to marry the woman he had once loved and quite possibly still did; after his fashion. But if he did still love her, would he tell me she was an animal?

  If he wanted to shatter the image I had of her, and replace it with one of his own making, yes.

  I went back the following afternoon. I had a word with the attendants before he was brought down from the ward, and to my surprise he’d had a quiet night. I’d expected to hear that he’d smashed up his room, or gone for someone on the corridor, but he’d done nothing out of the ordinary, and for a second I wondered if he genuinely didn’t care what Stella did. But no, all my instincts told me that he cared very deeply indeed. It is of course a clinical commonplace that love and hate closely coexist in the psychic economy. What I wanted to know was to which pole Edgar was gravitating, and to what extent his feelings were pathological.

  They brought him up to the front of the ward, and he was dressed as before in hospital grays. He’d been shaved, though not very expertly, there was a nick on his leathery cheek crusted with dried blood. His attitude was as detached as before. When we were alone I offered him a cigarette, which he tucked behind his ear. I came straight to the point.

  “Why is she an animal?”

  “What made her an animal, or how do I know?”

  “How do you know?”

  He gazed straight at me. Behind his eyes I saw the seething turmoil of sick thoughts and sane ones. A sick thought emerged.

  “I could smell it.”

  This I had not heard before.

  “What could you smell?”

  “Rutting. They were always at it. She was the same with me out there in the garden. Always in heat.”

  “Who was always at it?”

  “Nick and her.”

  “Nick!”

  She had been candid with me about Nick. She had allowed him into her bed only once, and that was in the hotel. Edgar was watching me now with an expression of gloating disgust. Was I seeing it again, that spontaneous reorganization of experience to make it conform to a subsequent delusional production? Wasn’t this precisely what he’d done to his memories of Ruth Stark, hadn’t he inferred a pattern of promiscuity in her, too, that didn’t exist? We regarded each other carefully.

  “Wasn’t that what you said about Ruth?”

  “She was a whore. Stella, she’ll do it with anyone for nothing.”

  I couldn’t help thinking, with a pang of unease, about Trevor Williams. I covered my mouth with my hand and watched him for a few seconds. He hated her, all right. He hated her and he was as sick as ever, and I felt desperately sorry for him, sorry that everything he felt and thought about Stella was contaminated by this foul falseness.

  As I left the room I heard him quietly humming. Then, just as the door closed, he cried: “Cleave!”

  I came back in and waited with my hand on the door.

  “Well?”

  He stood up and I thought he might be about to attack me. But it was gone, the insolence, the bitterness. Now just a desperate sincerity as in a low hoarse voice and in a tone of utter reasonableness he made his plea.

  “Let me see her.”

  I was astonished.

  “What harm can it do? Just for five minutes.”

  He had almost succeeded in making me believe he hated her. But he couldn’t sustain it. I regarded the poor sick doubled creature before me and felt a great surge of protective tenderness for him. Whatever it was that Stella had given him, he was far too fragile now to live without it.

  “No.”

  • • •

  She began to hear talk on the ward of the dance. She was asked if she would be going. Her first reaction was to recoil from the suggestion. For weeks she had struggled to sustain an image of herself, despite the humiliation of her change of status from doctor’s wife to patient, and it had not been easy; she was frequently aware of veiled contempt from both patients and staff, particularly as she obviously enjoyed special favor with the superintendent. No one had insulted her directly, a tribute, she thought, to her successful incarnation as the woman of sorrows; but to play the woman of sorrows at the hospital dance, this was a performance she did not relish. For she was not at all confident of her ability to behave with serenity in the Central Hall, it would be just too brutally exposed, the fissur
e in her life. The unavoidable conclusion, the glaring moral of the story, would be that this was just another fallen woman, and a pathetic creature at that. She didn’t want that.

  But then the familiar dilemma arose, the murmuring inner voice that reminded her of the delicate politics of her situation. Would it matter to me? I was still her psychiatrist. Dare she risk an act of nonconformity? Dare she stay away? There was no knowing, and it made her anxious having to think it through. Oh, but a woman planning her honeymoon in Italy does not quail before the prospect of a hospital dance! And it occurred to her then that this might be the last real challenge she faced in her short career as a mental patient. Well then, face it she would, she would give a last performance as the woman of sorrows.

  So she steeled herself for the ordeal and began to consider her wardrobe, her makeup, her hair. She would not be seen as the fallen woman even if the eyes of the entire hospital were on her.

  By my calculation it would have been that night or the next that instead of swallowing her medication she held the pills in her palm, and later hid them, probably at the back of her cupboard, perhaps tucked into the lining of a brassiere. Parole patients are trusted and we do not expect them to hoard their medication, which is why they are permitted a degree of privacy. At dawn I imagine her standing in her nightgown staring out of the window at the courtyard below and watching the first light bringing up the tones and textures of the bricks. It must have somehow become clear to her that nothing would ever change, that neither psychiatry nor the passage of time would obliterate what she’d seen that morning on Cledwyn Heath, the head breaking the surface, the clawing arm.

  But whose head? Whose clawing arm?

  Shadows shifted in the courtyard. The sun was rising.

  I immediately knew something was wrong and I was concerned. She had been brought across from the female wing as usual, and no sooner was she in my office and the door closed behind her than I was peering at her closely.

  “What’s happened?” I said, taking her arm and leading her to a chair. I sat down beside her.

  She didn’t want me to suspect anything out of the ordinary.

  “Nothing’s happened. What could have happened?”

  She managed to get some humor into this, as if to say, We both know how eventful life can be in the female wing. Still I frowned at her. I was being the doctor now.

  “I don’t like the look of you. Are you dreaming again?”

  She had told me a few days before that the dreams were far less vivid now, and far less frequent.

  “I wake early and then I can’t get back to sleep.”

  “I don’t want to increase your medication,” I said. “I don’t think you want that either, do you? You don’t want to be in a stupor all day.”

  “The medication’s fine, Peter, really it is. I always wake up early in the summertime. I don’t suppose there’s been anything from the Home Office?”

  I shuffled through the papers on my desk. It didn’t escape me that she was attempting to steer the conversation away from herself. “Apparently we’ll hear something by the end of the week.” I looked up. “Is it an awful strain, my darling?”

  “One can’t help feeling anxious.”

  “Please don’t worry. They’d tell me if there was a problem. Are you looking forward to your new life?”

  She put her hand on my arm. “Of course I am,” she said.

  I regarded this sad, beautiful woman and thought of Max, broken Max, solemnly intoning, Perfidy, mendacity. No, it was absurd, and I dismissed the thought.

  She never caused the night staff any concern. She dared not, for any disturbance would alert them to the fact that she was unmedicated. Her sleeping body never betrayed her. She was never shaken awake by an attendant, so she had to assume she appeared to be sleeping soundly. By day the woman of sorrows, by night the dreamless sleeper; in these last days, as she would have started thinking of them, the days before the dance, she was performing all the time, hers was a total performance, with no chance ever to peel off the mask and unfasten the costume, let it fall to the floor and step out of it.

  The women around her grew daily more excitable. The dance was of vital importance to the patients of the female wing. What bustle there was! She made small jokes about it. I of course had attended more hospital dances than I cared to remember and smiled as I thought of the tide of suppressed hysteria that swept the female wing in the days before the great event.

  “And it’s a full moon,” I said.

  “Oh dear,” she said, “that’s very bad.”

  “Actually it’s not. What is bad is the morning after. Such an anticlimax. A lot of you ladies are rather depressed the day after a dance.”

  “I shall have to be on my guard.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’m worried about you. In fact you don’t have to go if you’d rather not. I’d understand perfectly if you didn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t hear of it,” she said. “Not go to the dance? How very antisocial.”

  “You’ll be much looked at and commented on. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes I do,” she said.

  As she was being escorted back along the terrace to the ward she must have realized that her worries were needless after all. But having decided for diplomatic reasons to attend the dance, she had begun in an odd way to look forward to it. For she had decided, I believe, to let what happened there determine her fate.

  The female patients were all in their places in the Central Hall before the men were brought in. For the last few hours the atmosphere on the ward had grown steadily more feverish till it reached a pitch of anticipation that could only end in disappointment. Frantic women in all states of undress roamed the corridor in search of hairpins, perfume, underwear, makeup. A squabble over a cheap brooch would have come to scratches but for the intervention of an attendant. There were screams, there were tears, there was much silly chatter from the younger women about boyfriends and love affairs. The more mature women tried to stay calm but it was difficult to ignore the mood sweeping the ward and growing steadily more frenzied as seven o’clock approached.

  Stella stayed in her room and dressed carefully. The smart clothes she had brought with her from Wales were too tight on her now; not precisely woman-of-sorrows, they suggested sin, rather, but then how was a woman to come by her sorrows if she knew nothing of sin? She again counted her pills. She was calm now. She had, she thought, enough.

  When she left her room and joined the other women on the ward her appearance had a dramatic effect. They realized immediately that she was by far the loveliest among them. They were proud of her, and intended to enjoy a reflected glory when they entered the Hall, or rather, when the men came in. They left the ward rather quietly, given the cacophony of a few minutes ago. The awful majesty of the evening was brought home to every woman there.

  Escorted by their attendants they made their way across the courtyard and along the passage to the gate that gave onto the terrace. The evening was warm and the light was just beginning to thicken in the scented air. Women whispered to one another, the last anxieties were voiced, as a slowly swelling pride in their collective womanhood and their one true flower of beauty grew in all hearts. Stella was their flower of beauty, as she moved calmly among them with a loose black shawl thrown over her bare arms and shoulders against the evening air. The woman of sorrows, among her handmaidens, was making her farewell appearance.

  The Central Hall was as she remembered it. Chairs were placed around the walls, the big bay windows were thrown open to the evening, and the band was tuning up on the stage. A few attendants were waiting for the women, and as they entered I came in from the terrace with the chaplain. I acknowledged her immediately with a bow, and then I saw what she was wearing. I stood there, as did the chaplain, and we gazed at her with astonishment. Then, as it dawned on me what she’d done, and what it must have cost her, I slowly nodded. For under the shawl it was the same dress, the same black evening dress of coarse r
ibbed silk, cut low at the front to reveal the curve of her breast, that she’d worn to the dance a year ago. The effect of it was more dramatic than it had been even then: not only did the dress complement her extraordinary physical beauty, but the very wearing of it, here, tonight, was the gesture of a spirit unbroken by shame. I felt proud of her.

  She settled down and watched the bustle around her, the attendants moving back and forth, conferring with one another, and the more restless of the young women already over at the table for their soft drinks; and the senior staff talking and laughing with exaggerated ease like the aristocracy they were. It was all a sham. Not one of them could think of anything but that she had been one of their number just a year ago, and the covert glances cast her way were numerous. That she should choose to wear that dress—! I had no recourse to covert glances. I made it clear that I was watching over her with affection and solicitude. My calm eye oversaw everything and missed nothing, and Stella was not disturbed. The propriety and order of the event were a direct effect of my presence, my quiet authority and the deference I enjoyed from patients and staff alike.

  Time passed, and beneath her composure she grew tense. She saw the men coming in and felt the atmosphere change, felt it grow charged and slightly dangerous. The aristocrats were less languid now, the attendants more attentive. As for the women of the female wing, they grew very alert indeed. The band had already gone into its first number as the last of the men’s wards were escorted into the Hall. They filed in and took their places, and Edgar was not among them.