the other one

The other one is the name Stella Raphael gives to Edgar Stark when his familiar self seems to vanish under the force of jealousy and paranoid fear. It is not presented as a separate person or as a clinical diagnosis; it is Stella’s way of describing a change she experiences as both intimate and alien. The phrase lets her hold on to the man she loves while trying to understand the violence and suspicion that increasingly make him dangerous.

A divided presence

The expression takes shape as Edgar becomes suspicious that Stella wants to return to Max Raphael. She tries to explain that she misses Charlie Raphael, not Max, but Edgar appears unable to understand her. His intelligence seems to have dulled, and his voice grows coarse. The change is not merely an argument between two people: to Stella, the qualities by which she recognized him are becoming inaccessible.

At a pub, the fear becomes unmistakable. Edgar behaves as though every man they encounter might take Stella away. He mutters angrily, catches himself, and stops, shaken and bewildered by the voice he hears coming from within himself. He hates what he seems to be turning into. Stella holds his hands and urges him to keep fighting, promising that she will not leave; after a difficult effort, he regains something like his former manner. Yet the recovery brings no certainty. Stella has seen a divided man, as if the person she knew on the hospital estate had been invaded by an alien presence, and she cannot tell how long that familiar self will last.

The narration describes Edgar’s fearful vulnerability while preserving the distinction Stella makes between the man she remembers and the presence that frightens her. That distinction is emotionally sustaining, but not secure: Edgar’s distress and his behavior belong to the same person, however foreign they seem to him and to Stella. The phrase therefore names a rupture in recognition rather than explaining it away.

From estrangement to eclipse

The phrase returns with greater force when Stella and Nick bring Edgar breakfast. Nick carries two quart bottles of brown ale; Stella calls out cheerfully, but her laughter dies as she approaches. Edgar has not moved or spoken. He stands staring at them, his lip lowered and teeth clenched. Stella’s recognition is stark: the sick one is there, and there is no Edgar at all. Here the expression no longer describes a troubling side of a person who can still be reached; it conveys his apparent disappearance from the encounter.

The rupture also changes the three-way relationship. Edgar had been suspicious of Stella’s attachment to Nick, but now he turns his hostility on Nick as well. Stella has seen the other one before, though never this badly, and Edgar has never before turned on Nick. Her weary question is not simply when the episode will pass: she is confronting a recurrence that has widened beyond the jealousy she had previously tried to manage. She sits down, lights a cigarette, and feels sick and depressed.

When Edgar attacks Stella over his belief that she is sleeping with Nick, her attention fixes on an orange rolling across the floor and on the expense of replacing it. That small, practical thought sits beside the violence without making it less real. Later, hearing Edgar scrape a blade against a stone, she asks what he is sharpening. His answer is that it is a knife. Her earlier understanding of him as reliably himself has become impossible to trust: she wonders whether she knew him at all, or created that other version from her own need.

Recognition of danger

A change in Edgar’s treatment of an orange brings Stella to a more decisive recognition. He cuts a slice and tentatively tastes it as though the fruit were unfamiliar. Stella remembers that Edgar had believed Ruth Stark was poisoning his food. Until this moment, she has rationalized his violence and explained his jealousy; the possibility that he now suspects her of poisoning him makes the threat immediate. What she had managed to suppress about his illness comes back into view.

Stella’s fear is directed, in her own understanding, not simply at Edgar but at the madness she sees in him. She thinks he may become violent and fears he could do to her what he did to Ruth Stark. She wants to escape but does not dare leave the room, convinced that Edgar might perceive her intention and that discovery would be fatal. The phrase thus reaches its most consequential limit: distinguishing the sick presence from the beloved man may help Stella endure his episodes, but it cannot make the danger external to their relationship or keep her safe from it.

Meaning and limits of the phrase

The other one shifts in meaning across these scenes. At first it names an alien voice that Edgar himself seems to hear and resist; then it describes a temporary eclipse after which something like his old self returns; finally it marks an apparently complete absence of the man Stella expects to meet. Each recurrence makes the division less reassuring. Edgar’s effort to regain control matters, but it does not undo Stella’s knowledge that control may fail again.

The phrase also records the cost of Stella’s care. She tries to steady Edgar, reassures him that she will stay, and treats him as a clinging, touchy child, even while grieving Charlie in private. Her devotion makes her an attentive witness to Edgar’s distress, but it also places her in the position of managing his fear and concealing her own. By the time she recognizes the poisoning delusion, the name she has used to separate Edgar from his illness can no longer contain what she knows: the person she loves and the person who threatens her are not safely separable in practice.