Stella leaves her family to join Edgar in London after Peter Cleave confronts her with the danger she has chosen not to see. His warning does not end the affair; instead, it precipitates her departure. In turning away from her family and toward Edgar, Stella converts a secret attachment into an irreversible act, while the costs of that choice begin to register almost as soon as she makes it.

The Warning and Decision

Peter finds Stella in the kitchen after she has left the garden. She has brought her basket inside and is cutting cooking apples at the sink. Peter takes the coring knife from her and turns her to face him, insisting that she listen. He tells her that Edgar Stark’s wife, Ruth Stark, was first his model, and that Edgar had built his art around her. When his idealization collapsed, Peter explains, Edgar developed morbid delusions about Ruth that escalated until he murdered and mutilated her, cutting off her head. Peter stresses that Edgar has shown neither insight into his actions nor genuine remorse.

Stella listens without looking at Peter, then rejects the warning as irrelevant. She says she does not know where Edgar is and has no reason to seek him out, and asks Peter to leave. He repeats that he came to warn her and urges her to take the warning seriously. After he goes, Stella runs upstairs and weeps. The tears release the anxiety of the preceding weeks, but their source is not only Peter’s account of Edgar’s violence: she also understands that Peter and the others know about her. If they know, she thinks, then her relationship with Edgar is finished. Her despair gives way to calculation. She tells herself that she can still go back to him; waiting would mean that, by the time she returned, he might be gone.

The phrase she repeats to herself—if she acted now—turns a possibility into a plan. Max Raphael is at the hospital, the house is otherwise empty, and Charlie Raphael is at school. Stella takes a drink and paces the drawing room, imagining that she will pack a suitcase, call a car, and leave for Horsey Street without coming back. She calls the car. For a moment, thoughts of Charlie nearly stop her: she recognizes that her departure will affect him, but pushes the thought away and proceeds.

On the way to the station, Stella asks the driver to stop at the bank and withdraws the few hundred pounds in the joint account. At Victoria Station, the crowd overwhelms her. She sits at the back of the cafeteria with coffee and a cigarette, terrified, then watches herself leave a coin by the saucer, gather her handbag and suitcase, and walk out as though she were an ordinary provincial visitor on a shopping trip. In the taxi to Horsey Street, detachment gives way to exhilaration. The decision is made, and the prospect of seeing Edgar again makes the remaining journey feel intolerably slow.

Arrival at Horsey Street

At the top of Horsey Street, Stella stood with her suitcase as the cab pulled away. Nick was with Edgar in the warehouse loft. He told Stella they had not expected her; she replied that she had not known she would be coming and asked whether Edgar was there. Nick hammered on the door and called for Edgar to open it. When the lock finally turned from inside, Edgar appeared and stared at her. Stella picked up her suitcase and asked to come in. Edgar glanced at Nick, then asked whether she had come to stay. Stella said she was with him. His wary stillness broke into a broad grin: he flung an arm around her neck, and they lurched together into the loft, embracing in the middle of the floor. The journey’s anxious, deliberate steps ended in a reunion that made her abandonment of home feel, for the moment, like arrival.

Peter later acknowledged that he had anticipated Stella might do something like this, but had expected her to heed his warning. He had underestimated both her desperation and the extent to which Edgar had ensnared her. From this point, he no longer witnessed Stella’s life directly; he relied on her later, tentative and disjointed account of the days that followed. The shift in access matters: the escape is first narrated through the precise itinerary of her decision, then through a lover’s recollection and the family she has left behind.

Stella could reconstruct what her disappearance would mean at home. Max would return from the hospital and find her gone; Charlie would come back from school, and calls would follow as bewilderment became concern and then anxiety. She imagined Max resisting the truth at first, before realizing, as the hours passed, what she had done. Yet she had deliberately avoided thinking about Charlie while packing, ordering the car, and leaving without a note. She had tried to blur him into Max, making him part of the man she was abandoning, because facing his reaction threatened the happiness she had chosen to pursue. On waking after her departure, she pushed the thought away again. Her guilt remained, in her account, a shadow moving behind the brightness of her lover: present, but kept out of sight.

The Departure’s Later Reckoning

The choice to leave Charlie Raphael behind acquires a terrible retrospective weight when, after the Raphaels have moved to Wales, Stella is with him at a pool on Cledwyn Heath. During a severe dissociative episode, she watches him splash among the weeds while trying to catch something in the shallows. When he loses his balance and struggles in deeper water, she remains apart, smoking. The narrative renders her movements as rigid and separate: she turns her head away, brings the cigarette to her lips, and turns back as Charlie’s head and arm briefly break the surface. Hugh Griffin comes over the hill, sees what is happening, and plunges into the water; Stella does not call out to him or move to help.

Hugh carries Charlie out and tries to revive him, but the boy dies. At first the adults treat Stella as being in shock. The response changes when Hugh insists that she had watched Charlie struggle without raising the alarm or attempting to save him. Whether a shout from the hill could have made a difference is later disputed because of the distance to the water; what horrifies the community is her apparent stillness. Sympathy turns to condemnation, and people call her unnatural, evil, inhuman, or mad. She is charged with manslaughter, remanded, and questioned repeatedly. Her experience is described as numb detachment: she watches herself endure the interviews as if from within a barricaded part of her mind and from a point outside her body.

This later catastrophe does not make the departure from home its cause. It does, however, throw the earlier decision’s evasion into sharper relief. When Stella left without a note, she had briefly considered what would happen to Charlie, then pushed the thought aside; later, at the pool, her inability to respond becomes a matter of life and death. The book links the two moments through the problem of attention: first she deliberately refuses to imagine her son’s distress, and later she appears unable to act as he is in danger. That connection complicates any simple account of her departure as a choice between domestic duty and romantic escape, without erasing the difference between a conscious decision and a dissociative state.

During a later meeting, Max Raphael tells Stella that the shock will wear off and that guilt will follow, devastating her so profoundly that she will need close watching for fear she may attempt suicide. He predicts that, with Peter Cleave’s help, she may eventually come to terms with what she has done, though she will remain terribly sad. Stella responds by throwing her lighter at him and trying to climb over the table to scratch his face. The warning that once drove her toward Edgar has become an unbearable forecast of the grief she cannot yet face. Her departure had left guilt shadowing the happiness she pursued; Charlie’s death makes that shadow impossible to keep at a distance.

The Interview’s Clinical Aftermath

In the hospital meeting, Max begins speaking after a silence, just as Stella is about to ask him to end the interview. His forecast of overwhelming guilt and lifelong sadness turns the encounter from an attempt at communication into a pronouncement about her future. Stella responds by throwing her lighter and trying to climb across the table to scratch his face; staff rush in and take her away. The narrator closes the scene with an ironic judgment: Max is left to congratulate himself on his skill at the psychiatric interview. His certainty about the grief to come may be intended as care, but the encounter shows how clinical interpretation can become another form of control when Stella is not ready—or able—to answer it.