Asylum Read Free Page A

this was a couple of weeks before the dance. Curious to see what the boy was up to, she wandered down the path and he shouted to her that he’d invented a test of strength, and that she should come and see. Charlie Raphael was an overweight little boy with pale skin like his mother’s, which in the summer became lightly freckled. He had dark brown hair that fell over his forehead in a thick fringe, and when he grinned you could see the gap between his two rabbity front teeth. That summer he invariably wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt, baggy shorts, and sandals, and his legs were always scratched and muddy from his various outdoor projects.
    Stella sat on the bench by the wall, in the shade, and watched as Charlie made the patient stand there on the path holding a spade horizontally with a hand at either end of the shaft, then, with his knees bent, ducked underneath and grasped the middle of the shaft.
    “Lift!” he cried.
    The patient glanced at Stella and lifted, and Charlie rose slowly off the ground, his face screwed up with concentration and his knees drawn up beneath him as he clung with both hands to the spade. “I’m counting!” he shouted. “One, two, three, four …”
    He hung from the spade to a count of twenty, at which point Stella, laughing, begged him please to allow the poor man to put him down. “Down!” shouted Charlie, and was gently lowered onto the path. “You’re a strong man,” he said, gazing with admiration at Edgar, who seemed not at all strained by the ordeal. Stella told me that it was while Charlie was clinging like a monkey to the shaft of the spade that she felt the first stirring of interest in the man. He had good hands, she noticed, long, slender, delicate hands, and she wondered what his work was, on the outside.
    The next day she again went down to the conservatory to see what he was doing. She freely chose to do so, nothing can excuse or obscure this fact. She found him up a ladder, removing broken glass from the frame of the structure, carefully working it free of the crumbling putty. He was dropping it into a dustbin beside the ladder, and every few moments the drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by breaking glass. When he saw her approaching he came down the ladder and pulled off his heavy gloves.
    “Mrs. Raphael,” he said, standing squarely in front of her, panting slightly and pushing his hair off his forehead. He produced a red bandanna from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his face and then from his hands, watching her throughout with an expression that she described as affable but at the same time mocking, somehow, or rather challenging, as though he wanted to provoke her to show him who she was.
    “You didn’t have to stop working,” she said, quite at ease with this sort of jousting, and liking the man immediately. “I only wanted to see what you were doing.”
    “Edgar Stark.”
    They shook hands. Stella shielded her eyes as she turned away and gazed up at the conservatory. “Is it worth saving?” she said.
    “Oh, it’s a lovely thing. They built them to last back then. Like that place.”
    He grinned at her, indicating the Wall, visible through the pine trees on the far side of the garden by the road.
    “This won’t be quite so grim, I hope.”
    “It’ll be a nice little summerhouse when I’m finished. Settling in all right?”
    “We’ve been here a year.”
    “Is it that long?”
    He took out his tobacco tin and began to roll a cigarette. It smacked of independence, this gesture, and she approved of it. He didn’t behave like a patient.
    “How long have you been here?” she said.
    “Five years now, but I’ll be out soon. I killed my wife.”
    When I heard this I thought, vintage Edgar. But Stella could match his candor.
    “Why?”
    “She betrayed me.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    He was no fool. Here there was tragedy, and she was sympathetic. The wife of a forensic psychiatrist was hardly likely to shrink in horror from