Asylum by Patrick McGrath Page A

thinking of delusional patients, and it was apparent here. Driven by morbid unconscious processes to suppose that his wife was betraying him with another man, he had reasoned, first, that they must have ways of signaling their arrangements, and second, that their activities must leave traces. He had then manufactured evidence of such signals and traces from incidents as banal as her opening a window just as a motorbike was going past in the street below, and from phenomena as insignificant as a crease in a pillow or a stain on a skirt.
    I asked him, as I did at the beginning of every interview, if he still believed he had been sexually betrayed.
    “Oh yes.”
    This was said with utter assurance. He was rolling a cigarette, his eyes on his fingers. He nodded several times.
    “How long had it been going on?”
    He looked up and glanced out of the window, gathering his thoughts. A slight frown as he touched the edge of the cigarette paper with his tongue. He looked eminently reasonable and sane. I saw him come to the decision to be frank with me at last.
    “Eight or nine years.”
    His expression said, Now you understand everything.
    “But that’s how long you’d been married!”
    He nodded, genuine sadness in his face.
    “When did you first suspect it was going on?”
    “I knew from the beginning.”
    “Are you saying that throughout your marriage you knew your wife was being unfaithful to you?”
    “Yes.”
    “With the same man?”
    “No. There were others.”
    “How many?”
    His face came suddenly to life. He was bitterly amused.
    “How many? Hundreds. I lost count.”
    “And you did nothing about it?”
    “I pleaded with her. Threatened her. I don’t think it was her fault. She wasn’t responsible.”
    He began pushing his hands through his hair.
    “It did no good?”
    “She laughed at me.”
    “I see.”
    I allowed a silence. The reports I’d read indicated that the marriage had been relatively stable until a year before the murder. Were they wrong? Was Ruth Stark promiscuous? Had he been plaguing her with accusations all along?
    “Did anyone know about your unhappiness?”
    He nodded. He gave off the air of a man forced to make a difficult admission, one harmful not to himself but to another.
    “Who knew?”
    “Various people.”
    “Friends? Family?”
    He nodded again. I now knew that what I was hearing was all a product of the delusional structure.
    “So she was sleeping around with a lot of men from the start of the marriage. You knew this, you talked to her about it, but she paid no attention.”
    His eyes flared with a sort of astonished incredulity.
    “She laughed at me!”
    “She laughed at you. And others knew what was going on.”
    “I didn’t have to tell them. They could see for themselves.”
    “And she didn’t care.”
    “It was her work,” he said. “She was a whore.”
    This was new. “Go on.”
    “She brought them to the studio while I was out. I’d see them waiting in the street, hanging about till I was out of the way. She could do ten or twelve a day. She couldn’t help it.”
    He paused there. He gazed at me with such a pathetic expression, begging me to believe him, that I was moved to get out of my chair and come around and put my hand on his shoulder.
    “And you knew,” I said quietly. “All those years you knew.”
    There hadn’t been anything more after that. I sat at my desk and listened to the tape recorder humming in the silence and then clicking off I stood up and gazed out into the evening as it stole across the marsh. Morbid jealousy. The delusion of infidelity. Freud thought it a form of acidulated homosexuality, the projection of repressed homosexual desire onto the partner: I didn’t love him, she does. But I considered this unlikely in Edgar’s case. For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The