Asylum Read Free Page B

such a confession.
    “Were you a carpenter on the outside?” she said.
    “Artist. Sculptor. Figurative mostly. You like art, Mrs. Raphael?”
    “I have so little opportunity down here. In London, yes.”
    He wasn’t at all obsequious, she said, this was her first impression, nor did he condescend to her. She said there was something solid and mature about him, and I couldn’t help thinking of all the wildly delusional talk I’d heard on the subjectof his late wife. She wouldn’t have thought him so solid and mature had she heard any of that, I thought. But she hadn’t, and so, the next day, after gathering what she needed from the vegetable garden, she again went down to the conservatory.
    He was up his ladder and this time he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Charlie was on the garden wall, and Edgar was talking to the boy about football. He was a big man with broad shoulders and a heavy build, well fleshed out on the chest and hips and belly, with soft white skin. There was no hair on his body, and she thought he might be the sort of man who grew fat later in life. She suggested they might like a cold drink.
    When she came back out with a jug of lemonade Edgar had his shirt on. She asked would he mind if she sat on the bench in the shade for a while. She enjoyed watching him work, she said, and I thought of Max, cerebral Max, as tall as Edgar but stooped, and pale, and forever polishing his spectacles; Max may have conceived the idea of restoring the conservatory, but it was another man’s labor that carried it through. And already his efforts were apparent. Much of the old glass had gone, and the structure was beginning to assume a skeletal appearance. It was strangely beautiful, she said, and when she returned to the house this was the image she carried with her, of that big confident man up a ladder with his shirt off, carefully picking broken glass from the frame of the Victorian conservatory.
    She went back the next day, and the day after. He told her about his son, the boy he’d deprived of a mother; Leonard, his name was, he’d be Charlie’s age now, though Edgar hadn’t seen him for more than five years. His late wife’s family were looking after the boy and they were determined, he said, that he should never know who his father was. It was a story guaranteed to arouse a mother’s sympathy.
    All lies. Edgar had no son.
    One day he asked her if he could call her by her first name, and she said yes, but not in front of John Archer or Charlie.
    Another time, as he was sketching the design of an iron finial that had rusted badly and would have to be recast, he asked her if he could do her head. She said he could. He had her sit on thebench while he worked, and in a few minutes had produced a strange sketch, all smudged lines, not at all naturalistic, with none of the roundedness and monumentality I saw in Stella, but a curious likeness all the same. She asked if she could keep it and without a word he tore it from the pad and gave it to her.
    “But you must sign it,” she said.
    She kept it in a locked drawer and showed it to nobody, for reasons she was reluctant to look at too closely. Nothing improper was occurring, on the surface, but she hadn’t said a word about her new friend to Max; and by consistently failing to mention an event of significance in her day she was practicing a form of duplicity. She rationalized it. She should have known that deception eventually eats away all that is wholesome in a marriage, and she should have faced this, but she didn’t. She chose not to. From this evasion all else followed.
    Oh, but it was so trivial, she told herself, it was absurd to think that talking to a patient in the vegetable garden could amount to anything. But if it was all so trivial, why did she have to conduct this argument with herself? Because of her growing sexual warmth for the man, which she foolishly indulged in this oblique manner, seeking his company, allowing him into her imagination.
    It was