Asylum by Patrick McGrath Read Free Book Online

this crude bed that she felt a sudden astonishment at what she was doing: she was planning to bring a man here for sex. And not just any man, a patient. Your patient, Peter. She fled the place, locking the door behind her, and returned to the house, where she found Mrs. Bain at work in the kitchen.
    That day and the next she didn’t go near the vegetablegarden, though she could hear him out there hammering and sawing. At last a reaction had set in, a slow, horrified recoil, first aroused, she said, the night she’d sat at the edge of the goldfish pond and was affected by the warmth and security the house had seemed to offer. This reaction was slow to appear because drawn from deep in her psyche, so that by the time it rose to consciousness it had grown massive and was experienced not as apprehension but as horror. Horror at the very thought of endangering not only her own security but Charlie’s too; it seemed then cruelly irresponsible to put at risk the boy’s happiness.
    How quiet he could be at times, she remembers thinking when he came home that afternoon. She was eager to be with him, guilty for the thoughts she’d been thinking in the pavilion that morning, as though, she said, she’d been unfaithful to him . 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? It’s not the blunt fact of the thing, it’s all in the effect it would have if known. The thing itself is insignificant. She agreed with me, in principle. But none of that was relevant anymore. Now the point was to guarantee utter secrecy. This was what preoccupied her as she sat on the back lawn in the shade of the ash tree, and Charlie lay on his front on the grass in the sunshine nearby, propped on his elbows and frowning at a book with his hair flopping over his eyes. As though he sensed her thoughts he suddenly looked up.
    “Mummy.”
    “Yes, darling!”
    He then produced an extraordinary physical contortion, as though he were thinking with his whole body and the thought was a complicated one. He rolled half over onto his side and stared up at the sky, one plump arm pulled around the back of his neck, his hand clutching his chin, the other lifted straight up, fingers splayed against the sun.
    “I’ve thought of a joke,” he said.
    “Well?”
    “Ask me why I fell out of the apple tree that day.”
    “Why did you fall out of the apple tree that day?”
    “Because I was ripe!”
    “Very funny.”
    She couldn’t stay away from him. She tried. She had had her moment of horror when she confronted the implications of what she was doing, but the effects were short-lived. Knowing how close he was she couldn’t control the constant restless excitability of her imagination. The next morning, after Max had gone up to the hospital, she crossed the backyard to the gate in the wall.
    It happened again, that extraordinary feeling she could only think of as intoxication. He was at the far end, down by the conservatory, where he had set up a sawhorse on trestles beside his workbench, and he was hard at it, pushing the saw with a strong, easy stroke. He heard her when she was halfway along the path, and he turned and watched her approach.
    “Go on with your work,” she called quietly as she came closer. “Don’t stop for me.”
    But he didn’t go on with his work. He fished his tobacco tin out of his trouser pocket, sat down on the bench by the wall, and rolled a cigarette. She sat down beside him.
    “I’ve been over to the pavilion,” she said.
    “I know.” His tone was sardonic.
    “How do you know?”
    “One of the men saw you.”
    She should have been alarmed by this but she wasn’t.
    “Can you come this afternoon?” she said.
    He paused a moment, faintly smiling as he licked the edge of the cigarette paper. He enjoyed the urgency he had aroused in this pale passionate woman. She saw it, and touched his face.
    “Can you?” she