Asylum by Patrick McGrath

will be ruined without the working party. Look at it.”
    “Are you listening to what I’m saying?”
    She turned toward him. “I don’t know what it is you want,” she said. “You think I’m hiding something. I’m not.”
    “Did he ever touch you?”
    “No!”
    “Did he ever ask you for money?”
    “No. Don’t you think I’d have told Max if anything like that had happened?”
    Jack took his spectacles off. He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He sat up straight and leaned against the bench and stared out into the sunlit garden. He was a big, worried man in his sixties with shrewd eyes and a gray, cropped skull. He was close to retirement. He didn’t want this problem. The gold band on his ring finger gleamed in the sunlight filtering through the ivy over their heads.
    “I don’t believe you’re telling me the whole truth,” he said.
    She didn’t protest. She made a shrugging motion and shook her head slightly, as though at a loss how to convince him.
    “Stella, if you’re in some sort of trouble, if he’s persuaded you into something—”
    “What?”
    “I know Edgar Stark. I understand how he operates. There is no shame in admitting that he has involved you in his case, won your sympathy, set you against Max and Peter and myself. He would have identified you immediately as someone he could use. Did he tell you we were going to discharge him shortly? None of it is true. But I can’t help you unless you tell me what happened.”
    “Nothing happened.”
    Jack sighed. “Nothing happened.”
    “No.”
    “You won’t tell me.”
    “I am telling you.”
    He picked up his Panama. “Perhaps it’s as well for you that he’s gone. Come and talk to me soon. Will you?”
    She nodded.
    She watched him walk heavily back down the path. Her heart was beating very fast and her hands were trembling.
    Vigilance. There was nothing Jack had said that Edgar hadn’t already told her he’d say. She made her way slowly back along the path. She was uncomfortably aware of how persuasive the superintendent was, of how easy it would be to succumb to the warm, paternal tone he employed as he offered her his understanding and support. It required vigilance, and more than vigilance, it required a deliberate act of will to keep in the foreground of consciousness that it was Jack Straffen who was attempting to manipulate her, not Edgar.
    Oh, he was cunning, my Edgar. He had prepared her for something like this, and shown her how she should react. He had secured her silence, and his own security, in advance; and without even telling her he intended to escape.
    During the period immediately after the escape Stella and Max kept a curious distance from each other. She had good reason to avoid him, but why, she wondered, was he so wary of her? Because he was afraid that the rumors were true. He knew her well enough to entertain a doubt. She admitted to me at the end of a long, emotional session that a year before any of this happened she’d told Max that she was not prepared to be buried alive in a cold marriage, a white marriage, because his own sexual drive was weak, or because he lacked the moral or physical imagination to continue to find her attractive, or because he channeled all his libido into his work, or because of whatever explanation he cared to offer. She thought he had probably discounted the threat implicit in this ultimatum, but now he was faced with the possibility not only that she’d carried it out but that she’d done so with a patient. This was something that must be pushed away, for to see it as feasible was to accept responsibility for the failure of the marriage, at least atthe physical level, and perhaps for Stella’s disastrously ill-judged choice of a lover as well. Max was not prepared to talk to her about any of this. As far as he was concerned, the best medicine was denial.
    So they moved around that large sad house during the last hot days of summer like ghosts, drifting past each