Asylum by Patrick McGrath Read Free Book Online Page A

murmured.
    “Yes.”
    She tried not to show him how the excitement mountedwithin her as this conversation went forward. She felt the fabric of his corduroy trousers against her bare leg. It was stupid to take risks in the vegetable garden but she kissed him anyway.
    That afternoon they met in the cricket pavilion. They undressed each other, they lay down together, but all she would say about the sex was that it was effortless, and mutually intense; she had never known anything like it, this vigorous physical struggle their bodies took to with such immediacy and force. Afterward he took some whisky, and this worried her slightly, it seemed an unnecessary risk. He had a flat metal flask in his pocket and he filled it from a bottle behind the bar.
    “Suppose they miss it?”
    He crossed the room and knelt down beside her where she sat soft and flushed and disheveled on their makeshift bed. He took her face in his hands and kissed her.
    She saw him as her charming rogue. She couldn’t argue with him. She couldn’t oppose him at all, it wasn’t possible, for she had begun to surrender herself and no longer felt distinct and separate from him, rather that she was incomplete without him. She understood what was happening, she was falling in love, and she didn’t want to stop it. She said she couldn’t stop it. She acquiesced in his stealing from the pavilion; she assumed his own attitude of disregard of risk, and rationalized it. A few days later, when he asked her for money, she gave him everything in her purse.
    No control. You don’t control falling in love, she said, you can’t. At the time it had amused her that it should happen like this, with this man. A patient. A patient working in the vegetable garden. Stella, I said, you could not have chosen more unwisely had you tried. But the truth is, she said, I didn’t choose.
    She functioned as normally as she could at home but she was never properly there. Her day became focused on that one point in time when she waited with rising excitement in the gloom of the cricket pavilion, waited to hear his boots on the wall as he clambered onto the roof of the shed, then heaved himself over the windowsill and dropped to the floor inside. He would cometoward her, grinning, where she waited, ready for him, on the blankets, and sink down with her, and she lost herself completely when she reached for him and felt his strong hands on her body. Oh, she loved him.
    Perhaps.

I believe now that the visit that summer of Max’s mother, Brenda Raphael, in a curious way accelerated the progress of the thing. One Friday afternoon in early August, five or six weeks after the dance, she arrived at the deputy medical superintendent’s house while I was there. I had left the hospital early and dropped in on Stella on my way home. I had recently heard from John Archer about her budding friendship with Edgar, and naturally I wanted to talk to her. I had no chance to bring it up, however, for she at once told me her mother-in-law was expected.
    “I offered to meet her at the station,” she said as she led me down the hall and into the drawing room, “but oh no, she didn’t want to put me to any trouble. She makes it sound as though I’m so stagnant it would be dangerous to move me.”
    We had a drink in the garden, and she was distant, distracted. At the time I did not associate her mood with the faint soundsof shattering glass and hammering that drifted in the still air from the direction of the vegetable garden. Five minutes later we heard a car in the drive. Together we went down the hall to the open front door just as the taxi driver brought up the first of Brenda’s numerous suitcases; she herself was just emerging from the back of the car. She was an urbane, autocratic woman, and she was also wealthy. I happened to know she was helping Max and Stella maintain their standard of living here, and that their car—a white Jaguar, of all things—had been her gift when Max was appointed