Stella and Edgar begin their extramarital affair in the summer of 1959, when a patient assigned to work in her garden becomes the focus of Stella’s attraction and then her lover. The relationship begins within the ordered grounds of the hospital, but soon extends beyond them; in Stella’s later account, its urgency overwhelms ordinary caution, and its emotional force resists the moral judgments that might have made it easier to understand.

Setting and Circumstances

Stella is living with her husband, Max, and their ten-year-old son, Charlie, in the deputy superintendent’s house. Max, a forensic psychiatrist, has recently taken the deputy superintendent’s post. Edgar, a former working sculptor who has been at the hospital for five years, is still considered unsafe to release: he continues to insist that the murder of his wife, Ruth, was justified by her supposed infidelity. His remaining delusion makes the ordinary work assignment in Stella’s garden carry a serious institutional risk.

That summer, groups of parole patients leave the hospital grounds each morning under attendants’ supervision to maintain the estate. Edgar is assigned to the Raphaels’ garden, where he works on restoring the conservatory. Stella sees him when she goes out to pick vegetables or flowers. If the attendant, John Archer, is not there, she sits and talks with him. She later acknowledges that she was attracted to Edgar almost from the beginning; although she tries to dismiss the feeling, his regular presence gives her pretexts to seek his company.

From Acquaintance to Affair

In a later conversation with Peter, Stella is asked when the relationship first became sexual. She identifies the Vegetable garden. Recalling the scene, she describes the decision not as a calculated risk but as something that seemed impossible to avoid or postpone. The memory returns gradually in the conversation, as if the experience is acquiring shape again; her account presents the encounter as an overwhelming necessity rather than a choice she can readily explain.

Stella also rejects Peter’s suggestion that Edgar may have been using her because he had already planned to abscond. Her answer makes clear that she did not understand their connection as an escape strategy on his part. The affair develops amid the daily routines of the estate, where her visits to the garden and his assigned work bring them repeatedly into contact, even as the possibility of discovery hangs over that contact.

The Affair Beyond the Hospital Grounds

Looking back, Stella tells Peter that she had desired Edgar with a physical and emotional intensity unlike anything she had experienced before. She recalls the affair both on the hospital estate and during the weeks she was in London with him. Her account makes the relationship more than a clandestine attachment confined to the garden: it becomes a shared life carried beyond the institution and into the city.

Stella offers no moral condemnation of Edgar when she recounts that he absconded without telling her or that he hit her. When Peter asks why she does not criticize him, she cannot give a reason; the idea of making her love conditional on his conduct simply does not arise for her. This refusal to judge him illuminates the imbalance between the relationship’s intensity for Stella and the harm and instability that accompany it.

Consequences and Retrospective Meaning

The affair unfolds alongside Edgar’s escape from the hospital. He leaves wearing Max’s clothes, which he has hidden in the woods at the end of the Raphaels’ garden, and makes his way to London. The escape exposes the consequences of the hospital’s lax supervision of outside work parties, while Max’s delay in establishing Edgar’s whereabouts gives the fugitive additional time. The affair is therefore bound to the breach between Stella’s domestic life and Edgar’s life beyond institutional control, though Stella does not recall it as a scheme Edgar devised to facilitate his escape.

Later, after Charlie’s death, Stella tells Peter that the affair is finished. That statement supplies her own decisive endpoint, but it does not turn the relationship into a simple moral lesson: she continues to speak of its intensity without condemning Edgar. In the larger account of her life, the affair is both an escape from the frustrations of her marriage and the beginning of a destructive sequence whose consequences reach far beyond the garden where she remembers it starting.