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garden with Charlie. She was reading a novel, but every few moments she glanced up with some unease, for he was kneeling on the edge of the goldfish pond, gazing into the water. The pond was deep and she disliked seeing him there on the edge but she was trying not to be too protective. All summer he had been busy with amphibians of one sort or another that he kept in glass tanks in the backyard. Max had said that he’d be delighted if Charlie decided to become a zoologist.
    Stella disliked amphibians and she disliked Charlie poking about in the pond like this. She was about to tell him to come away when she heard the telephone ringing in the house. “Get back from the edge!” she shouted as she crossed the lawn and went in through the French windows.
    Edgar had a room in the ground-floor ward in Block 3. At one end of the ward was the dayroom. At the other end were the attendants’ office and two small interview rooms, in one of which there was a telephone. How he found the means of usingthis telephone I have never been able to establish. Certainly it was at great personal risk, for had he been discovered he would instantly have lost his parole status. All internal calls go through the hospital switchboard, so I presume he impersonated an attendant and told the operator he was looking for Dr. Raphael.
    When she came back out a few minutes later she was not sure exactly what had happened. He had apologized for his behavior, and been so funny, and, oh, just so grown-up about it, she said, that she found herself liking him after all. He had reminded her of their friendship and told her how important it was to him, and mentioned that he hadn’t really known a woman for five years. He was a clever one, my Edgar; what he had done was inexcusable, he said, but he appreciated that she’d said nothing. It didn’t occur to Stella, then or later, that she should tell Max about the call, just as it had never occurred to her that she should tell him what Edgar had done to her at the dance.
    Charlie was still at the edge of the pond when she came back out. He shouted to her that he thought there were snakes. She sat down and opened her novel. She did not tell him to come away, though he was still bending close to the water, one hand gripping the edge while with the other he groped about at the bottom of the pond. Her mind drifted almost at once, and she gazed unseeing at the back of the house, the open French windows of the drawing room, the door giving onto the hall, and at the end of the hall, on the other side of the house, but visible from where she sat in the shade of the old ash tree, the front door. Beyond the front door lay the drive, the trees, and the Wall. She felt relieved, she felt at ease, as though the disturbance in the order of things effected by that unruly penis had now been quelled, and her friendship restored.

At this stage Stella had no real idea how disturbed Edgar Stark was. She had never regularly listened to him spinning out his morbid delusions, as I had, and though she knew by his own admission what he’d done, she’d excused him by thinking of it as a simple crime of passion, which of course permitted her to romanticize him. When Edgar realized this he changed his tactics, but in the beginning I believe he simply wanted her to influence Max to look favorably on his efforts to secure his release. In this he displayed his naïveté, for things simply don’t work like that. Much more pertinent from my point of view was that he was behaving manipulatively and, at the outset at least, attempting to use his considerable sexual attraction as a means of control. The fact that the one he wanted to control was a doctor’s wife was a mark of the extravagant grandiosity of his designs.
    Early in our relationship I had discussed with Edgar mystrategy for the psychotherapy. I told him that what I wanted to do was break down his defenses: strip away the façades, the pretenses, all the false structures of his