Stella and Edgar begin their affair

Stella and Edgar Stark begin their affair when Stella crosses from imagining a sexual relationship to initiating one in the Conservatory. What starts in silence and secrecy becomes a recurring arrangement, then an emotional surrender that alters Stella’s sense of herself and her daily life. The affair is also a betrayal within the long doctor–patient relationship between Edgar and Peter Cleave, and, in Peter’s view, a return to the destructive way Edgar had related to women before.

Background and Breach

Peter has worked with Edgar for almost four years, hoping to dismantle the defenses and false structures of his disordered personality and help him rebuild. The affair therefore appears to Peter not as a private romance alone but as evidence that Edgar is acting in bad faith: instead of examining his pathological relationships with women, he is setting in motion a pattern associated with the murder that had first brought him to the hospital. The secret relationship compromises the trust on which their treatment has depended.

The attraction is not wholly sudden. Edgar has already made a blunt suggestion that Stella come into the Conservatory; the idea of sex with him has long been active in her imagination. Yet when he first articulates it, Stella is flustered and runs back toward the house. Their transition from fantasy to action is marked by a gap between her retreat and her later deliberate return. Peter also sees a larger emotional force at work: neither, he thinks, anticipated that the intensity of the feelings Edgar aroused in Stella would overwhelm caution and the fragile order of their lives.

The First Encounter

On a bright, hot summer afternoon, Stella moves restlessly through the house in bare feet. Sunlight catches the polished wood floors. She pauses at a mirror, changes into a loose, low-necked summer dress, reapplies her lipstick, looks out across the lawn from the French windows, and pours herself a drink. These preparations give her desire a physical and practical form, even as she remains unsettled by what she is preparing to do.

She leaves through the front door, crosses the drive, and enters the neglected meadow through a gate in the high hedge. From there she reaches an arched opening in the garden wall near the Conservatory and waits with her back against the bricks. She hears Edgar working and glass breaking in the dustbin; her shadow falls across the path. For a moment she is unsure she can stay, imagining that she may find her own behavior ridiculous and go back inside. The pause ends when Edgar appears. Without speaking, Stella pulls him into the Conservatory, takes his face in her hands, and kisses him fiercely. They lie together on the floor, concealed from view by the low stone wall at the base of the frame.

Stella does not give Peter an explicit account of the sex. He distinguishes what she has told him from what he can only imagine: he supposes the encounter was urgent, instinctive, and brief, but cannot claim those details as her testimony. What he does know is that afterward she runs upstairs to the bathroom, turns on the taps, removes her clothes, and lies in the bath for an hour with her eyes closed. Her mind seems empty, yet the knowledge of what she has done remains beneath the surface. She does not acknowledge it directly, but an unspoken awareness persists that she may do it again.

From Encounter to Arrangement

The first encounter becomes a pattern of assignations. Edgar’s freedom of movement is limited, making time and place difficult to arrange, but the pair establish meetings despite those constraints. After Edgar is intercepted by John Archer, Stella meets him by the Conservatory and tells him that they ought to get organized. Their secrecy now has a structure: not just an isolated crossing of a boundary, but a relationship sustained through planned opportunities.

The excitement of these meetings grows alongside the risk. When Stella asks Edgar whether he can come that afternoon, he pauses and smiles while preparing a cigarette. She notices his enjoyment of the urgency he has stirred in her, touches his face, and repeats her request. She tries to conceal her rising excitement, but feels the fabric of his corduroy trousers against her bare leg. Even in the Vegetable garden, where taking risks seems foolish, she kisses him.

That afternoon they meet in the Cricket pavilion. They undress one another and lie together; Stella describes the sex to Peter as effortless and mutually intense, unlike anything she has known. Afterward, Edgar takes whisky from a bottle behind the bar and fills a flat metal flask. Stella worries that this is an unnecessary risk, but the encounter has already begun to draw her into his disregard for danger. She cannot oppose him as she once might have: she sees him as a charming rogue and feels she is becoming incomplete without him.

Attachment and Consequences

Stella recognizes that she is falling in love and says that she cannot stop it. The relationship’s force appears to her beyond deliberate choice: she had not set out to choose a patient working in the Vegetable garden, but now finds herself yielding to him and rationalizing his actions. When Edgar asks her for money a few days later, she gives him everything in her purse. Her growing attachment therefore has practical consequences as well as emotional ones; she supports him and accepts risks she had initially noticed and questioned.

At home, Stella functions as normally as she can, but is never fully present. Her day gathers around the next meeting in the Cricket pavilion: waiting in its gloom, listening for Edgar’s boots as he climbs onto the shed roof, heaves himself over the windowsill, and drops inside. She waits on blankets, ready for him, and describes losing herself when she reaches for him. The concealed pavilion becomes the organizing point of a life outwardly continuing at home.

Peter suspects that Stella’s behavior may be linked to a desire to hurt Max Raphael. Stella shakes her head and says she does not think that is the reason, though Peter perceives a deep reservoir of resentment that she is not yet ready to discuss. The affair’s beginning thus opens onto a conflict that neither its secrecy nor Stella’s declaration of love resolves. For Peter, it also sharpens the clinical danger: the relationship is repeating a pattern that treatment was meant to expose, while Stella’s absorption in Edgar is already displacing caution, ordinary presence, and her separate sense of self.