No, Edgar was not among them, he was in no condition to attend a dance.
She danced several times over the course of the evening and although the eyes of the entire Hall were upon her not once did the mask slip. She didn’t dance with me; I danced with no one; but she caught my eye each time she did dance, and I understood that her demure, inscrutable smile was directed at me, that in a way it was with me that she danced. The chaplain alone of all the senior staff asked her out onto the floor. He danced well and allowed her to move with ease and grace in his arms. The glimpses she had of my face, the fleeting instants when our eyes met, all reassured her that she was carrying it off beautifully, that she appeared exactly as I wished her to appear. Poor Peter, she must have thought.
Toward the end of the evening I went onto the stage and stood at the microphone and said a few benign words and made a joke or two, as was customary. I am a popular medical superintendent, and the blessing I bestowed was warmly received. Stella watched me, not listening to my words, just absorbing the presence I conveyed that night, my patrician ease, my warm, wise humor. I believe she genuinely hated the prospect of causing me pain.
She sat out the last dance and joined the other women when it was time to go back. They made their way in the moonlight along the terrace to the female wing. There was some excited chatter but mostly they were quiet, and a sort of tired satisfaction seemed to be the mood. All agreed it had been a good dance, perhaps the best for years, and while some romances had been cruelly crushed out others had sprung to life. On the ward they fondly said good night to one another and went to their rooms.
Stella prepared for bed. The lights were turned out and the ward was silent. A little later she quietly got out of bed and turned on the cold tap and let the water run into the basin. Then she opened her cupboard and reached in.
I was sitting in my office writing. Outside my window the terrace and the gardens and the marsh beyond were bathed in moonlight. I paused and looked up, frowning. Something had been nagging at me since I’d seen Stella in the Central Hall, a vaguely disquieting feeling I’d suppressed until now, something connected to her wearing the dress she’d worn the night Edgar had taken her in his arms and pressed his penis into her groin. Absurd to think she could still be in love with him! And then I thought: but what if I’m right? And that’s when I saw it. That’s when it all became clear, and at last I knew that it was not dead, that it was far from dead, and I understood why she had worn the black silk dress.
Now I was alarmed. I capped my pen and reached for the telephone. I dialed an internal number and a telephone rang in the front office of a downstairs ward in the female wing. Oh, I had been blind! It was not for us, that dress, it was not a gesture of pride, or defiance, thrown in the face of the hospital community, it was for him, she’d worn it for him, it was her wedding dress, she’d worn it the night she became wedded to him, and as I waited for the phone to be picked up I at last realized the full extent to which I’d deluded myself: I had allowed my judgment to be clouded by private concerns, and in the process lost my objectivity. Classic countertransference—
The attendant on duty spoke to me briefly. Without replacing the receiver she left the office and went along the corridor to Stella’s room. She opened it a crack and saw that the bed was occupied and its occupant asleep and breathing deeply. She closed the door and returned to the office and told me what she’d seen. I thanked her and replaced the receiver. I did not resume writing, however, instead I stood gazing out of the window, still profoundly uneasy.
Rapidly I reviewed the events of the last weeks. I remembered the flare of feeling I’d seen in her eyes the day I’d suggested he was here in the hospital. I imagined how it might have affected her, this fragile kindling of hope, and realized that when I’d then said that it was hypothetical, that he wasn’t here, the feeling wouldn’t have been extinguished, that once aroused it was too strong to be snuffed out with a word. I imagined her returning to her room and breathing on that small flame of hope, keeping it burning.
She had kept it burning ever since. Oh, she would have quickly worked out why I should first tell her the truth, that is, that Edgar was here, and then regret telling her, and contradict myself, and she’d have realized too that for me a measure of her mental health would be her indifference to the mention of the name Edgar Stark. She’d have known then that she must pretend not to care. Everything that followed—asking for a job in the laundry, sitting alone on her bench—even the dreams of a screaming child—all a performance, a distraction, invented to keep me from the truth. And the truth was that her suffering these last weeks was not remorse for the death of her child, the truth was that she was still obsessed with Edgar Stark, to the virtual exclusion of everything else.
Yes, even the dreams of a screaming child, for it was not her child who disturbed her nights, it was him, it was Edgar! And her engagement to me, that too a masquerade, the desperate duplicity of a woman still passionately in love with another man and frantic to conceal it—
I found I was pacing the floor, my mind ablaze with this new truth, and with an effort I brought myself under control and sat down at my desk. And then I thought, If she believed he was here, and she wore the dress for him, and he didn’t appear, how would she react to that? And I knew then what my psychiatric intuition was telling me, and why I’d been feeling so uneasy. If she couldn’t have Edgar then she might as well be dead. Life was no longer tolerable without him. Better to die than suffer this way. This response is rare, but it happens. It is the last stage of all.
A few minutes later I was moving along the terrace in the direction of the female wing. My pace quickened and soon I was striding with some urgency through the shadowy cloisters and moonlit courtyards of the sleeping hospital.
Through the long hours of the night we fought to save her, but Stella had been among psychiatrists quite long enough to gauge with precision a fatal dose of sedatives. She didn’t regain consciousness and shortly before dawn she died. As she relaxed, as she let go all effort of deception and repression, her face changed, her beauty became even more remarkable, and once again she was as pale and lovely as when we’d first known her. Everyone was distressed. I reminded them that those who wish to die will always find the means, sooner or later, but it was no real comfort to those of us who had been looking after her and had come in our own ways to love her. We buried her in the hospital cemetery three days later, outside the Wall, behind the female wing, and the chaplain conducted the service. There were not many mourners present, apart from staff. It was a hot, bright day and we were all uncomfortable in black.
The Straffens sent their regrets, apparently Jack’s health is not good, but Max came, and so did Brenda. Max had changed dramatically even in the few weeks since I’d seen him in Cledwyn. He was more than ever like an old man, thin, stooped, with skin like paper. He clung to his mother for support. She was strong, as I’d expected she would be; Brenda is good at tragedy. Afterward I gave them a glass of sherry in my office. If Max was conscious of the poignancy and irony of his presence in my office, the superintendent’s office, that day, he didn’t show it. Brenda surprised me by resorting to unctuous platitudes. She murmured that she hoped that Stella was at peace now. I nodded and turned away, slightly disgusted at her vulgarity. Max clearly had not told her of our marriage plans.
I have not retired as I planned to. I still have work to do. Edgar remains on the top ward in the Refractory Block. No appreciable improvement in his attitude yet, he remains hostile and uncooperative, but that will change, already I sense him weakening; he must know that I am all he has now. I have not told him that Stella is dead, for I am eager to hear his side of the story first. There are many questions still to be answered. Max, for one, is still convinced that his clothes were not stolen on impulse, as Stella said, but that she gave them to Edgar, in other words that she was acting against us even then, and knew he intended to escape.
On reflection, Edgar will hear of her death whatever I
do; if he hasn’t already. This is a large institution, and people talk. His suffering will be acute, and we will have to be vigilant. Like me, like all of us who knew her, he responded strongly to Stella’s beauty, but he went deeper than the rest of us, he idealized her and then had to struggle against the chaos of his own passions when the image he’d created could no longer be sustained. I think perhaps it’s what he was unconsciously trying to get at in his last sculpture, despite his claim to be engaged in an attempt to overthrow habit and convention in seeing, to be working against certainty. I feel for those two poor disordered souls, trapped here these last weeks, twisting in their private hells, each aching for the other. I have known more than a few of these destructive affairs, and they all come to this, or something like this, in the end.
I have resumed my habit of returning to the office in the evening. The police were most accommodating, and I now possess all the drawings he made of her in the studio, and also the sketch done in the vegetable garden. They are curiously tentative in outline and feature, and as a result have a sort of softness to the eye, what the Italians call morbidezza. I also have the head. I have had it fired and cast in black bronze. I keep it in a drawer in my desk. He worked so obsessively at it, those last days before he left Horsey Street, and he so worked it down, that it became slender and tiny in the end. It is a thin, beautiful, tiny, anguished head now, no bigger than my hand; but it is her. I often take it out, over the course of the day, and admire it. So you see, I do have my Stella after all.
And I still, of course, have him.
READING GROUP GUIDE
1. Stella thinks Edgar “was guilty of a crime of passion; and passion, in essence, was good, surely?” [p. 17]. “With Stella it was always the heart, the language of the heart” [p. 29]. Peter Cleave classifies Stella as a romantic. Is Stella a romantic? If so, what does her subsequent behavior indicate about romanticism?
2. “As a psychiatrist I wasn’t in the business of moral judgments” [p. 21], Peter says, and he later tells Stella, “It’s only when we feel pain, or the prospect of it, that we start to make distinctions between right and wrong” [p. 148]. Is Peter correct? What does he reveal about himself in making this statement?
3. Peter believes that Stella’s behavior is linked to a desire to hurt Max. “Perhaps that’s the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else’s happiness?” [p. 34]. How much of Stella’s behavior springs from hostility and hate? To what degree is passionate, romantic love inspired by hate or aggression?
4. “Most of us are dying of chronic neglect!” Stella says [p. 48], referring to wives in general and herself in particular. Is Max really neglectful of Stella? What makes her believe that she is being neglected and taken for granted?
5. Discussing Edgar’s condition, paranoia, with Stella, Jack says “we don’t really know how to treat them. Because we don’t really understand what they are.” [p. 72] Is he talking about his patients, she wondered, or women? Why does Stella think this at this time? What is the cause of her anger? Is Stella resentful at being a woman in a male community?
6. What is Stella’s reaction when Jack tells her that Edgar had decapitated his wife and taken her eyes out? What does this reaction say about her, her motivations, her state of mind?
7. The action of Asylum takes place over the course of exactly one year. Why does the author present the story in this way? How do the seasons, and the change of seasons, affect Stella’s thoughts and emotions?
8. What can you deduce about Max’s feelings for Stella from the way the story is told? Does he act from love, from hate, from a mixture of the two? Do you find Max a sympathetic character, or do you agree with Stella that he is cold and sexually indifferent to her?
9. Stella tells Peter that during the early days of their romance she and Edgar experienced “a breakdown of their separate egos, a falling away of personality, a sense of identity, a sense that they were essence to essence…” [p. 78]. Do you believe that Edgar experienced this in the same way?
10. We see Brenda principally from Stella’s point of view. Is she actually as unpleasant a character as Stella finds her to be? What purpose does she serve in helping to understand Stella?
11. How does Stella define the term “freedom”? When she claims to be seeking freedom, what does she mean? Is the sort of freedom she craves really possible? Does she ever find it?
12. How would you characterize the relationship between Stella and Charlie, and how does it change during the course of the novel? Does she behave as a typical mother? How does her erratic behavior toward Charlie in Wales illuminate the deterioration of her psyche?
13. “Was she really so blind to the danger she had placed herself in?” Peter asks himself. “Had she learned nothing from living among psychiatrists?” [p. 95]. What do you think: is she really blind, or does she choose to be so? Or does she willingly court danger, and if so, to what end? In her dealings with Edgar, do you find that Stella deliberately provokes him to violence?
14. What motivates Nick, very much at his own risk, to shelter Edgar from the law and, ultimately, to shelter Stella from Edgar? Do you believe that he enjoys the element of danger that his actions provoke? Do you think that he loves Stella? Or that it is Edgar he loves
15. Why does Max take Stella back after her return from London, and why does she decide to stay with him? Why does Max decline to tell Stella that Edgar might have made his way to Wales [pp. 184-85]?
16. Why does Stella allow Charlie to drown? Might his death be beneficial to achieving her desires? Does she really imagine that it is Edgar she sees sinking beneath the waves? Does Peter believe her when she makes this claim, or does he imply that she is lying?
17. “You had to explain it. . . either she was a monster or she was mad” [p. 202]. Peter decides to believe in her madness: “a classic Medea complex” [p. 211]; Max adopts a more theological outlook, positing the reality of good and evil: “She should be in prison” [p. 228]. Which man do you agree with? Is Stella evil, or merely misguided?
18. Edgar “idealized” Stella, Peter claims, “and then had to struggle against the chaos of his own passions when the image he’d created could no longer be sustained. I think perhaps it’s what he was unconsciously trying to get at in his last sculpture, despite his claim to be engaged in an attempt to overthrow habit and convention in seeing” [p. 253]. Do you find this connection between Edgar’s art and his feelings to be a plausible one?
19. As the novel progresses, Peter reveals more and more of his character, his will, and his motivations to the reader. Just how un-ambitious or ambitious is he? What are his real feelings toward Stella? What are his feelings toward Edgar? How far has he succeeded in manipulating the action, and the characters? What does the last sentence of the novel suggest?
20. Why do you think McGrath has chosen “Asylum” as the title for his book? What are the two meanings of the word, and are they connected or contradictory? At home with Max, Stella thinks of the asylum as a prison; frightened and penniless in London, she remembers it as a “misty mental realm where the sun always shone and order prevailed…a castle keep on a rocky ridge, and within its walls security and plenty” [p. 117]. In your opinion, what is the real character of the asylum?
PATRICK MCGRATH
Patrick McGrath lives with his wife, Maria Aitken, in New York and London.
ALSO BY PATRICK MCGRATH
ASYLUM
In the summer of 1959, Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting—a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella’s knowledge of Edgar’s crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues—a passion that will consume Stella’s sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.
Fiction/978-0-679-78
138-7
DR. HAGGARD’S DISEASE
The setting is a cliffside manor on the English coast in the early years of the Second World War. The narrator is Dr. Edward Haggard, a mysteriously wounded figure racked by morphine addiction and tormented by the memories of his intense affair with Fanny, the wife of his former chief pathologist. Fanny is dead, but when her son, a young fighter pilot, appears in Dr. Haggard’s life, the aging doctor finds out how an old passion can turn into a strange—and dangerous—obsession.
Fiction/978-0-679-75261-5
THE GROTESQUE
Something is rotten at Crook, the decaying English manor house that is the setting for Patrick McGrath’s exuberantly spooky novel. Fledge, the butler, is getting intimate with the mistress. Fledge’s wife is getting intimate with the claret. Sidney Giblet, the master’s prospective son-in-law, has disappeared. And the master himself—the one-time gentleman naturalist Sir Hugo Coal—is watching it all in a state of helpless fury, since he is paralyzed in a wheelchair, unable to move or speak.
Fiction/978-0-679-77621-5
MARTHA PEAKE
When Ambrose Tree is summoned by his ancient uncle to the brooding mansion Drogo Hall, he suspects it’s to hear the old man’s dying words and then collect a sizable inheritance. He has no idea he is about to learn the bizarre story of Harry Peake, Cornish smuggler turned poet who became a monster capable of the most horrifying acts. Or that he’s about to become psychologically enmeshed in the riveting life of Harry’s daughter, Martha, who flees her father for colonial America where she becomes a heroic figure in the revolution against England.
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