Asylum Part 10

This at any other time would have filled her with joy. Now she was indifferent. She said nothing. She shrugged. He was watching her closely; he saw her shrug, and it enraged him. He seized her wrists so that she half rose off the bed.

Immediately they became excited. They began kissing, and then they were pulling open their clothes. This overwhelming appet.i.te they had, this ravenous l.u.s.t, it alarmed her, she hated being constantly out of control. There was desperation in it now, and aggression, she worked off her anxiety and frustration in the s.e.x, and this time, as they clung blindly to each other, she bit his shoulder hard. The effect was dramatic. He reared up and slapped her face, but they didn't stop, and it wasn't until a minute or two later, when they came apart, that she rolled away from him and buried her face in the pillow. She felt utterly numb. It was collapsing as she knew it would and she didn't care. She heard him muttering some nonsense and she didn't listen. She lay on the mattress with her face stinging and her mind blank. She expected him to beat her up and she didn't care. But after a few moments he went back down to the studio.

She sat up and found her powder compact. Already her face was red. There would be a bruise. She snapped shut the compact. You fool, she told herself, over and over again.

When she returned from the cathedral he didn't apologize. It was late afternoon and he had gone back to work on the clay. He hadn't turned the lights on, and with the shutters half closed the loft was gloomy. The day had seen enough clarity, enough grating exposure; it was time for gloom and gin and eventually sleep. A night of gloom and gin. They were both depressed; they didn't speak; they felt no inclination to go out. Stella lay on the bed, sprawled on top of the blankets in stockings and slip, a woman adrift amid a flotsam of old cosmetics and yesterday's newspaper. When it grew dark he didn't turn the lights on, he pushed open the shutters instead, and the streetlight diffused a soft gray glow into the studio. Stella wanted to get drunk and try and see things with some sense of hope. She went down to the studio with her gin and drifted over to the window. Edgar was at the clay, hunched over it, and didn't turn around.

"I wish Nick was here," she said, and saw him stiffen.

When she awoke at dawn she was still on top of the blankets and she'd spilled her gin. Edgar was asleep beside her in his clothes. She sat up, a foul dry bitter taste in her mouth and her head already thumping from gin on an empty stomach, and got him into bed. They both immediately fell asleep.

It occurred to her the next day as she listlessly set about cleaning the place that n.o.body rises above their surroundings, not for very long. Stay in shabby, constricted places and then look in the mirror, what you see is shabby and constricted, watch your own behavior and see it turn cheap and shabby too. She had been thought a beautiful woman: that had all been stripped away, there was no place for beauty here and the more she tried to restore herself with cosmetics the more she looked like a tart.

Edgar seemed not to notice it. It didn't bother him. What bothered him was her. Ever since he'd met her running into the yard he'd become suspicious of her. He thought she wanted to go back to Max. She tried to explain to him it was Charlie she missed, not Max, surely he understood that, but he appeared not to. He appeared to have lost the quickness of intelligence she had grown used to. She said he seemed coa.r.s.e. Even his voice grew coa.r.s.e when he was like that.

I think he was frightened. I think any expression of distress from Stella he took as a signal of imminent desertion. Like many artists, Edgar had the soft fearful core of a child.

They went out to the pub the next night and he frightened her, he was so strange, behaving as though every man they saw was trying to take her away from him. He sat there muttering angrily to himself, then caught himself doing it and broke off, shaking his head, embarra.s.sed and bewildered by this other, foreign voice he heard issuing from inside himself, the distorted, ugly voice of jealousy and terror and need. It broke her heart to see him so miserable and helpless, for he didn't want to be like this, he hated what he seemed to be turning into. She held his hands and told him fiercely to hang on, to keep fighting, they'd be all right, she wouldn't leave him. Eventually and with great effort he got control of himself, and after that he became something like his old self once more. But now she couldn't trust it, because she didn't know how long it would last. She saw a divided man; she saw that the man she'd known on the hospital estate had not disappeared but had been invaded, rather, occupied, so it felt, by some other spirit that wasn't his. She told him it was because of the pressure they were under, and that a little time was all they needed. He didn't really take it in, he was frowning and rubbing his head as though he could dispel his illness as one shakes off a bad dream.

How much longer? She lay awake at night and asked herself how long they could last like this. The bruising on her face was still noticeable, and on these streets there were no illusions about how such things happened. She saw the sympathetic glances she got from other women, and when they were out at night she saw how their eyes flickered to Edgar to see what sort of a brute her brute was. It made her so very uneasy. Any one of those glances might draw the gleam of sudden recognition. So the days pa.s.sed, and all her efforts went into keeping Edgar steady, though when she went to bed, and he went back to his clay, her mind would turn to Charlie, and she wept silently into her pillow. She had to treat Edgar as a child now, a touchy, clinging child, and she wondered why she was looking after this child and not her own.

But it doesn't surprise me that she didn't leave him. At root, I suppose, in spite of everything she loved him, or told herself she did, and women are stubborn in this regard. She had made her choice, she had gone to him willingly, and it was unthinkable to run home because he was ill and his illness robbed him of responsibility. What did surprise me was that she could ignore the proliferating signals that an act of violence was imminent. It astonished me that her capacity for denial was so strong as to block the knowledge of what he was capable of. Even when she saw what he was doing to his work, even then she failed to recognize the danger she was in.

She was awakened at dawn by men shouting in the market. Edgar was asleep beside her. She got up and slipped on her coat and went down to the studio. She pushed open the shutters and admitted into the room a pale autumn light. She smoked a cigarette and listened to the market coming to life. The clay was covered in damp cloths as usual and on impulse she began to remove them. What she found was ugly and shocking. It was as she'd last seen it, a strangely attenuated head and shoulders, recognizably hers, but violently scarred and gouged now, she could see where he had gone at it with both his tools and his fingers. She felt sick and quickly covered it up again. But instead of fleeing the place, instead of running for her life, she went back to bed and took him in her arms and held him.

And then he was all right, and there was, again, pa.s.sion, and then tenderness. The s.e.x, she said, was rather painful now. Her menstrual rhythm was disturbed, and she even thought at one time she might be pregnant. I asked her if she wanted medical attention but she said no, she was fine. She'd been the one looking after the contraception and she hadn't been truly worried. No, much more worrying was him him. When his guard was down, when he trusted her, when he was himself, she regretted nothing. It was all worth it. At the smallest sign that he was receptive she surrendered. She only wanted to love him; her own will was crippled, the old pride had gone.

If only they had enough time time, she thought, then they would be all right. If he didn't do something stupid. But it was so hard to rea.s.sure him. It was his his photograph that had been all over the papers, not hers, this was his angry response, it was him they were looking for, him they'd put back inside, she'd be all right, she had Max to go back to. She no longer argued with him when he told her she had Max to go back to, there was no point in making him angrier. photograph that had been all over the papers, not hers, this was his angry response, it was him they were looking for, him they'd put back inside, she'd be all right, she had Max to go back to. She no longer argued with him when he told her she had Max to go back to, there was no point in making him angrier.

And what of Max? Did she ever miss him?

Not once, she said; she had thought about him, of course, but she insisted she had felt not a single pang of regret, which of course made it so bitterly ironic that Edgar should feel jealous and think she yearned to return to him. No, she had no feelings for Max. She said that had he been a real husband none of this would have happened, there would have been no emptiness in her, no hunger, she would not have needed what Edgar had offered her and which she had been unable to refuse, even though it meant losing everything in the process: child, home, a place in the world. Max seemed to her now a sort of dead man, a bloodless creature who behaved toward human beings like an insect collector, skewering them in gla.s.s cases with labels underneath, this one a personality disorder, this one a hysteric. Only after leaving him, she said, did she become aware of the extent of the lack he had created in her. She hated him for that, for pus.h.i.+ng her to the extreme of desperation. What would happen to her now she didn't know, but it seemed to her that all she could do was play it out to the end.

One day while she was sitting for him she asked about Ruth Stark. She asked him if he'd done her head in clay.

"No good," he said, without breaking the rhythm of his work.

"Why?"

"I couldn't see her at all in the end."

"Why not?"

He was absorbed with the clay and didn't answer her for several moments. When he did reply his tone was vague.

"All the men. I couldn't get through them."

"Get through them to what?"

"To what she looked like."

"Oh."

She was silent for a while.

"Her likeness," she said.

"I tried someone else but her head was all wrong too. I didn't want to know who she was, I just wanted to see what she looked like."

"How did Ruth take that?"

"What?"

"The other woman."

A small snort here. "She didn't like that at all."

"And?"

Another silence.

"I told her she could clear out if she didn't like it."

"Did you have s.e.x with the woman?"

Now he stopped working and gazed at her for a moment, a smeared wooden spatula hanging from his fingers. He grinned at her.

"No."

"Did you want to?"

"No! I just wanted to do her b.l.o.o.d.y head in clay!"

And then she thought she detected good omens abroad. She had been reading the papers every day and Edgar had not been mentioned for weeks. Nor had she been mentioned once, and certainly there had been no photograph. She a.s.sumed, correctly, that this was because the hospital didn't want it known that the deputy medical superintendent's wife was the lover of the escaped patient and had gone to join him. This would have been sensational indeed, and more sensation, more publicity, was precisely what Jack and the rest of us would be anxious to avoid. So yes, we hushed it up, and from her point of view this worked in their favor. It was progress.

Then Nick showed up again.

CHAPTER ...

Dear Nick. She had grown fond of Nick, tall, lanky, earnest Nick. It was Nick who usually gave Edgar the money he brought back to the loft. He had a small income from somewhere, and he was generous with it. Also, seeing how things were with Edgar and Stella, he had borrowed a small flat in Soho so as to give them more room. Stella was relieved to see him again. I believe Edgar was too, in his way; he was aware that he was starting to lose control, and I believe it frightened him. Without me his work was his only lifeline, the only thing that gave any sort of structure or purpose to his existence. He discounted Stella now, for he was increasingly plagued by suspicion, and though he fought these thoughts they cast a shadow over his mind, a persistent pall of misery and doubt that only rarely allowed him to see her fully and clearly anymore, and that was when he was working.

He had continued with her head, and the disfigurement produced by his gouging and stabbing became a stage in the evolution of the piece. He was eager to show Nick what he'd been doing, and Stella saw how her head seemed now to be both itself and an account of his fraught and increasingly tortured relations.h.i.+p with her; it was, she thought, pathology in clay. Nick understood immediately that Edgar was doing something important. His reaction made Stella wonder if it was possible that all they'd been going through was simply the turmoil that attaches to any serious artistic project. No creation without suffering, the greater the suffering the better the art, was this it? They were certainly being put through it for this head, she thought, and then asked herself would she prefer to return to the drawing rooms presided over by the wives and mothers of psychiatrists. She would not. She was grateful to Nick for leading her to this insight; she realized she and Edgar had been too much alone together, and perhaps it was nothing more than that. Nick was fresh air. The tension eased dramatically.

Oh, and he was good for Edgar too; she saw how Edgar tried to conceal his pleasure when Nick expressed genuine admiration for the work. Nick's reaction mattered as hers did not: Nick was an artist, he knew what Edgar was up to. Later the pair of them went out and came back with a case of red wine and a box of groceries. That night was one of the happiest she'd known in the loft. The two men were in good spirits, there was plenty to eat and drink, they shouted and laughed and talked into the night, and Stella kept a quiet eye on Edgar throughout and secretly exulted in his mood. It was the old Edgar she saw that night, the funny Edgar, affectionate, spirited, smart, laconic, and dangerous. He argued with Nick about painters. A pad of paper appeared and Nick sketched out the paintings he was planning. Edgar made a series of rapid suggestions and Nick listened and nodded, chewing his lip in that way of his when he concentrated, getting it all down as fast as he could. Later, when Nick, drunk, was stretched full length on the couch smoking a cigar, Stella told Edgar she had no regrets. They were drunk too. He stood up unsteadily and came around to where she was sprawled in her chair with a foot on the side of the table and her skirt riding up her bare thighs. He held her shoulders and leaned in toward her and solemnly apologized for being such a s.h.i.+t.

"You're not a s.h.i.+t," she said.

"Oh yes I am," he said.

"He is," said Nick from the couch.

Nick pa.s.sed out where he was and they slept late the next morning, which was a Sunday. Edgar was still unconscious when Stella got up and found the painter in the kitchen poring over his sketches and trying to decipher the notes he'd scrawled when Edgar was firing ideas at him. Stella said she needed some fresh air, she had a bad hangover, and Nick said he'd come with her. They left the place quietly so as not to wake Edgar.

They wandered down to the river. Nick looked awful. He was in his old tweed jacket and paint-spattered trousers and shoes, and he was unshaven, red-eyed, and baggy-faced. It was a gray, chilly morning with spots of rain in the wind, and after a few minutes watching the river they were both too cold to stay out. Nick suggested they stop in at the pub.

It was when they got back an hour later that the nightmare began. Edgar stood in the door of his studio glaring at them. He hadn't opened the shutters so the place was still dark and his face was indistinct. The couple of drinks in the pub had mobilized the alcohol still in Stella's blood from the night before and she was already squiffy.

"Darling," she cried, "we've brought you some breakfast!"

Nick held up two quart bottles of brown ale. "Hair of the dog," he said. "What's the matter?"

Edgar hadn't moved, he hadn't said a word; he just stood there glittering at them, his bottom lip pulled down and his teeth pressed tightly together. Stella moved toward him, her laughter dying and concern now clouding her features. The other one, the sick one, was there, that was all there was; there was no Edgar at all.

"What's wrong? Has something happened?"

"Don't come near me."

She turned to Nick, who was frowning at Edgar, as troubled by his behavior as she was. They were both quite sober now.

"Edgar-"

"Get out, Nick. Don't come back here."

"I don't-"

"Get the f.u.c.k out, Nick!"

"Look-"

Edgar moved toward him, clearly intending to hurt him. Nick backed away.

"Get the f.u.c.k out!"

Nick did what he was told. In silent amazement Stella watched him go.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d," muttered Edgar as Nick's steps were heard clattering down the stairs.

"Stop this, you're frightening me-"

"You little s.l.u.t. With Nick." Nick." He had started talking with a public-school accent like Nick's. He had started talking with a public-school accent like Nick's.

"I don't understand." But she did.

"'I don't understand.'" He mimicked her. "Yes you do understand, don't lie to me anymore."

A great weariness swept over her. She had seen the other one before but it had never been as bad as this. And he'd never turned on Nick before. How long would she have to wait this one out? She sat down and lit a cigarette. She felt sick and depressed.

"You bore me to death with this nonsense," she said quietly.

She picked up an orange from the bowl on the table and turned it idly in her fingers. The next thing, he was across the room and dragging her onto the floor. She was aware of the orange rolling away toward the window and she wanted to tell him not to tread on it as they were expensive. Just as he had before, he half lifted her up and held her there by the wrists, shouting that he knew she was f.u.c.king Nick, did she think he was a fool? She said nothing, there was no point, and he slapped her, harder than the other time, and she fell back onto the floor and turned over and buried her face in her arms.

She lay there, her breathing m.u.f.fled, her body heaving. She couldn't hear him. She didn't know what he was doing. But he was still in the studio. Time seemed to slow down and she couldn't tell how long it was since he'd hit her, whether it was one minute or ten. She dared not sit up. She feared enraging him further. Then she heard a sort of sc.r.a.ping sound. She couldn't identify what it was. She lifted her head slightly and opened her eyes. She could see him on the other side of the room, standing at the table with his back to her.

"What are you doing?"

He didn't turn, he didn't answer. She again felt bored with it all. She sat up sighing and gingerly touched her face, which was throbbing painfully. She reached for her powder compact to inspect the damage. Still Edgar's back was to her, and still he was making that curious sc.r.a.ping sound.

"I said, What are you doing?"

Then she recognized the sound. He was sc.r.a.ping a blade against a stone. She flipped open the compact. She was deeply alarmed. She stared at herself in the little round mirror. One side of her face was already changing color. There were little pulsing jabs of pain.

"What are you sharpening?"

No answer to this. She wondered if she should run for the door. How little she knew him after all. In the garden she'd known who he was. Then she'd have said that whatever happened in the future, whatever he did, it would be consistent with the man she knew. But he wasn't the man she knew. He was somebody else. Or had she just invented that other man, created him out of her need?

"What are you sharpening?"

"A knife."

A knife to cut her head off with.

"What are you sharpening a knife for?"

She was strangely calm as she scrutinized her face. She remembers thinking she should be grateful he hadn't broken the skin. Her eyes were smudged and she dabbed at them gingerly with a handkerchief. Her thoughts were of flight, for now he was going to murder her. Oddly the idea held no terror for her, she was detached from everything around her. The scale of things had changed. The compact she held in front of her face seemed far away, as though it had been compressed to the size of a coin. Her reflection was tiny. She couldn't make out her features properly, her face was so small.

"To cut up the orange with."

He was tiny and far away too. She saw him as if through the wrong end of a telescope. He had stopped his sharpening. He still had his back to her but he was watching her over his shoulder. A tiny man a long way away on the other side of a vast room.

"To cut the orange?"

Her voice seemed to issue from an unknown source, toneless and metallic. He crossed the room with his hand extended, offering a slice of the orange. She put it in her mouth. He didn't want to murder her, he wanted to give her a piece of fruit. He watched her intently as she ate it.

"What's wrong?"

It was so strange, the way he was watching her. She couldn't imagine what he was thinking. He shook his head and turned away. She saw him cut another slice of the orange and tentatively bring it to his lips, as though he'd never tasted it before. And then she understood. She remembered something I had told her about the delusions he'd harbored about Ruth Stark. She remembered me telling her that he thought she was poisoning his food.

This affected her in a way that nothing else had. His violence she had rationalized. His jealousy she could explain. But for him to think she was poisoning him with an orange! orange!-now she was alarmed. Now she knew that for his sake for his sake she must get away from him, and everything we'd told her, everything she had so far successfully suppressed, it all came flooding into consciousness, and for the first time she was mortally afraid of him. Or rather, not of him, but of the madness that was in him, this was a point she stressed. She knew she mustn't show her terror, for she believed now that at any moment he could become violent and do to her what he'd done to Ruth Stark. Perhaps with her he wouldn't need to get drunk first, perhaps he was already out of control. She felt that if he caught the smell of her fear it would set him off. she must get away from him, and everything we'd told her, everything she had so far successfully suppressed, it all came flooding into consciousness, and for the first time she was mortally afraid of him. Or rather, not of him, but of the madness that was in him, this was a point she stressed. She knew she mustn't show her terror, for she believed now that at any moment he could become violent and do to her what he'd done to Ruth Stark. Perhaps with her he wouldn't need to get drunk first, perhaps he was already out of control. She felt that if he caught the smell of her fear it would set him off.

She wanted to flee but she didn't dare leave the room. She sensed that he would know what she was thinking, and once he knew it would be the end.

"I'm going up," she said.

She picked up her bag and slowly climbed the staircase and sat on the mattress. She wiped the stickiness of the orange off her fingers and resumed inspecting her face in her compact mirror. Then she reached for her book, settled back on the bed, and without once glancing down into the studio she began to read. She could feel him watching her. Will it be now? The calm she was projecting was utterly sham. Her heart was beating fast, her skin was moist with fear, and panic threatened at every moment to overwhelm her.

All afternoon he stayed in the studio. He worked on her head. I think I can guess what a superhuman effort of will he made to stay in control. I think by working on her head he was trying to see her clearly, to see the truth of her, and so master and defeat the madness that was in him. Upstairs Stella guessed nothing of this, she simply prayed for him to go out. She dared make only mental preparations for her own departure. She lay among the bedclothes, her back propped against the bricks, smoking cigarettes. Having for so long denied what she knew about the murder of Ruth Stark, she could now think of nothing else. That he should think she was poisoning poisoning him-oh, he was mad, he was mad, and despite her terror she still found it in her to pity him, for she understood his madness as disease. She had lived among forensic psychiatrists far too long to forget that. him-oh, he was mad, he was mad, and despite her terror she still found it in her to pity him, for she understood his madness as disease. She had lived among forensic psychiatrists far too long to forget that.