The Girl Who Couldn't Read

by John Harding

  I returned my attention to Jane Dove and found her watching the retreating line of these most sorely afflicted patients. Her expression was like a frightened child’s. It was obvious, it obvioused, she was seeing the possibility of one day finding herself in the ranks of these wretches. I noticed her stance was very erect, as if instinctively she was separating herself from the women, who were mainly bent and huddled, as though they were ashamed of their dementia. Her neck, I thought, was long and white and smooth, most like a swan’s.

  At dinner Morgan tried to be his usual bustling self, all smiles and confidence, but I sensed something had gone out of him. In spite of the energy he put into the conversation, the brusque way he handled the serving dishes and the ferocious efficiency with which he chewed his food, the lines on his face were deeper etched today and he looked tired. I guessed his sleep after the incident with the madwoman had been every bit as disturbed as my own.

  I longed to know more about her, but it was difficult, because as he sat himself down he said, without looking at me, ‘Thank you for what you did last night, Shepherd. You were extremely vigilant and helpful.’

  I opened my mouth to put a question to him about the madwoman but, before I could get a word out, he went on, ‘Now, tell me about your day. I gather we had some new arrivals?’

  With his evident desire to put the subject to rest it was impossible – it impossibled – to repeat my query and I was obliged to forget my curiosity and report on the new patients the boat had brought. He interrogated me about them at some length in what I felt was unnecessary detail, which I took to be him shifting me even further from the events of the previous night.

  As soon as we had exhausted the topic of the newcomers, he was ready with more inquiries about how I had managed in his absence, moving from one subject to another as soon as the first was done with. Eventually, however, he ran out of things to ask and there was a pause in the conversation during which we both ate in silence.

  ‘Sir, about that woman last night –’ I got no further, as he waved a hand dismissively.

  ‘Don’t give it another thought, my boy. Just one of those things we have to put up with from time to time in our line of work.’

  I wasn’t to be so easily put off. ‘Of course, it’s just that I didn’t see her at exercise today with the rest of the third-floor group.’

  He let out a little laugh, which seemed out of place, given the subject and what had happened only a few hours earlier. ‘Of course not! You can’t expect her to settle down straight away after something like that. She’s under restraint. It will be some time before she is calm again. I couldn’t think of letting her outside until I’m quite certain it’s safe. You were on the receiving end of her violence yourself last night; you wouldn’t want her to attack someone else, would you?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Quite.’ And with that the conversation was closed.

  Something about all this was very queer indeed and yet Morgan had effectively slammed the door on any more discussion of the woman. The only other source of information was O’Reilly, although I knew this was a long shot; she was not at all well disposed toward me on account of what she saw as my mollycoddling of Jane Dove. She clearly disliked there being an area of the institution, even though it was only a single patient, over which she had no control. I knew all about pecking orders from my time on the chicken farm. I understood that, although I was a doctor and O’Reilly merely the chief attendant, she saw herself as above me in the hospital hierarchy.

  Nevertheless I resolved to give it a try; there was always a possibility she would let something slip. I duly sought her out next morning, ‘chancing’ to come across her in the hydrotherapy room where I knew she would be. Fortunately I found her alone, waiting for a patient to be brought to her.

  ‘Oh, Mrs O’Reilly,’ I said, as though surprised to find her there. ‘I was looking for Dr Morgan.’

  ‘He is never here at this time.’ She looked me straight in the eye as she said it. We both knew that I knew this.

  ‘Well, I think I will stay and supervise the treatment,’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘As you wish, sir. It’s completely unnecessary. I am quite capable of managing on my own. I’ve done it more often than not.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. It’s more for my own instruction. I didn’t mean to question your competency for one moment.’ I paused. ‘In fact, I was most impressed by it the night before last, the way you brought that woman under control.’

  She shrugged again. The compliment didn’t touch her. ‘It was nothing. I’ve done such things dozens of times.’

  ‘She did seem especially violent,’ I ventured. ‘Has she been here long?’

  She stared at me. ‘We have lots of them like her, believe me, sir. There is nothing special about her, nothing at all. You need not concern yourself about her.’

  I was trying to think of another way of opening up a conversation on the woman after this rebuff, but she spoke before I had the opportunity. ‘And how is your hand, sir? I believe you received a nasty burn.’

  I held up my hand. ‘Not really. Painful at the time and still a bit sore, but no lasting damage.’

  ‘Still,’ she said, her expression impassive and completely unreadable, ‘it was lucky it was your left hand and not the right. It might have stopped you writing otherwise.’

  I swear I saw the shadow of a smile pass over her lips, but it was gone before I could be sure. There was something triumphant about her bearing and I felt a sudden emptiness in my stomach. I remembered the abortive letter to Caroline Adams. I had dropped it in my wastebasket after I copied it out. Had O’Reilly somehow seen it? Had she been in my room, or looked through my trash? Or was this just paranoia that I had somehow caught from being among so many who suffered from it? Was being here driving me out of my mind?

  ‘Now, if you have no objection, sir,’ said O’Reilly, still looking me in the eye, ‘I must get on. I have things to arrange before the patient arrives.’

  If what she’d said was a challenge, threatening to ask why I had written a pack of lies about having a broken hand to a woman called Caroline, it was not one I could take up. I could hardly accuse her of going through my trash without exposing my own duplicity. I should have torn the abandoned letter to shreds. Why, oh, why had I not done so?

  14

  In the coming days I began to enjoy the time I spent with Jane Dove more and more. I looked forward to our sessions together. Partly this was because she was the only person on the island with whom I could be something approaching myself. I did not have to keep up the act with her as I did with Morgan. But mostly it was due to the nature of the girl. She had a quick and lively mind and a sharp, irreverent sense of humour. Most of all, like Desdemona with Othello, I fell in love with the language that she used. As I had surmised almost from the beginning, her way of speaking was anything but the gibberish Morgan had pronounced it to be. He’d made a cursory examination of her, as he did of all the patients, and concluded that her odd patois lacked rhyme or reason, whereas I soon realised it not only made sense but, in a peculiar way, even had some advantages over standard speech.

  She invented new words from old, often by changing the way they were used. She said ‘We outsided’ rather than ‘we went outside’, or ‘I downstairsed’ in place of ‘I went downstairs’, both of which I found perfectly clear and actually more economical than the conventional expression. She coined new words that had a power all their own to convey the mood of a place, for example, when she called the day room, where she had been compelled to spend her former days sitting unoccupied for hour after hour, ‘a dullery of disregard’. I could think of no better way to convey its atmosphere, both the boredom of those abandoned women, and also the neglect, that they were left like that because no one truly cared about them or whether they were unhappy.

  Gradually, as we talked together, I found myself imitating her. This wasn’t simply a conscious intention on my part to create a gr
eater intimacy between us, although it had that in it, but rather because I could not help myself. Her way of speaking was infectious. I would say to her, ‘You’ve aloned all morning, did that difficult?’ and she might reply, ‘I have always own-companied, it unbothers me.’

  When I made my first attempts at this way of speaking, I thought I detected a glint of laughter in her eye, although I could not be sure of it, nor whether if it were there she was delighting in having converted me to her ‘gibberish’ or was privately mocking me because she found my attempts at copying her feeble.

  She certainly corrected me when I broke the unstated, instinctive rules her language demanded, not openly, for it was never verbally acknowledged between us that we were communicating in this way, but simply by pretending not to understand me, and, if I did not then correct myself with something that adhered to the proper form, she might say, for example, ‘Oh, you mean you unheard me.’

  There was a hitch, though – there is always a hitch – which was that I began not merely to speak in her way of speaking but to think in it too. It was so easy and natural, and besides it had something in it that took pleasure in words for their own sake, in the funny ways a person can twist them and play with them, just as the best poetry often does, and it began to be automatic to me. Once or twice I even caught myself using it with Morgan, saying something like ‘I’ve forwarded to dinner all day’, which would have been Jane Dove’s shorthand for ‘I’ve been looking forward to dinner all day’, but luckily Morgan didn’t seem to notice, although nevertheless I concentrated on trying to keep separate the way I spoke to myself or Jane Dove and the way I talked to anyone else.

  As we languaged alike I began to hope Jane Dove might so comfortable herself with me she would begin to give more of herself away. I could see she had amnesia. It obvioused from the way she sometimes struggled visibly to retrieve some lost memory and from the evident distress it caused her when she failed. At the same time I could not help suspecting she remembered more than she let on, but I couldn’t figure the reason for this secrecy when, after all, she knew I was trying to help her. But, as a person who has always put on an act, not just in my working life but at every other time too, I understood how subterfuge becomes a habit that is hard to break. Was it possible that in her former existence she had carapaced herself with this hard outer shell for some reason and that she now continued to maintain it without any longer knowing why?

  Jane Dove now became my main interest, outside my own safety and survival, of course. Once I was accustomed to the routine of the hospital regime, there was little else to amuse me. The more time I spent with this swan-necked girl, the more I liked her and the more curious I grew about her previous life and determined to achieve some kind of breakthrough with her. This was fuelled by Morgan’s attitude to her, his mocking way of referring to her as my ‘guinea pig’, his sneering appraisal of the very idea of Moral Treatment or any aspect of it. Although he made a joke of it, occasionally he demonstrated an impatience with the whole experiment, mainly on the increasingly frequent occasions when I lingered too long with Jane and arrived late for some therapy – by which I mean half drowning or tying up one of the unfortunate patients – that he and I were meant to be administering together.

  From all this I could tell he would not tolerate me continuing the trial indefinitely. There was another time constraint too, because even if Morgan did not put an end to the whole thing before I had achieved some real success, my own situation eventually might. There would come a moment when I would have to make my move. I could not hope to keep up this masquerade for ever, nor would I want to. Even if it safed to remain at the hospital, it was not the kind of life I could live permanently. And the longer I remained, the more I comfortabled here, the likelier I was to be unmasked.

  As if to confirm that head-in-sanding would not do, that events would inevitably overtake me, one morning Morgan handed me another letter at breakfast. I recognised the hand immediately as belonging to Caroline Adams. The only good thing about this was that she was so far Shepherd’s only correspondent. I put it in my pocket for later, as I did not want any reaction in my expression to prompt a stream of questions from Morgan. I need not have worried; he was already looking at his watch and eager to get on with the affairs of the day.

  When I was at last able to sneak off to the sanctuary of my own room, I tore open the letter, ripping the envelope as if it had been this troublesome woman herself, and anxioused my way through the rambling pages inside.

  My Dear John

  Should I even use that word ‘My’? Am I still entitled to do so? I confess I do not know. My mind has been in turmoil ever since I received your letter this morning. It brought me great relief and yet great anxiety too. How is it possible for two such conflicting emotions to reside in the same breast? I do not know. Naturally I was overjoyed to find you alive and well, especially after the shock of receiving a letter addressed in an unfamiliar hand. (How is your poor hand? I do hope it is on the mend. While I am anguished by the thought of you being hurt and in pain, I thank God that it was no more than this when so many others suffered far worse injury and some even lost their lives.)

  But as I read your letter my joy began to drain away, like water down a drain. It was so cold, so unemotional. Where were those endearments that you know I so treasure in your epistles? Where was the mention of how you were missing me? Why did you not use your special name for me, when you always have before? Why did you not tell me something of your new life, your hopes and fears for it, and for how it may help our future and enable us to be together? It was as if the whole thing had been written by a stranger. And then at the end, that heartless signing off, no expression of love, none at all. Instead of anything warm and loving, just that cold and heartless ‘J’. It was like an initial on a tombstone to me.

  I tell myself to give you the benefit of the doubt, that it was difficult for you to write with an injured hand and that the absence of a final tenderness and that brusque signature are nothing more sinister than indications of fatigue, that you were physically incapable of writing more. I tell myself all this, but I do not convince, I am not persuaded. Reassure me, my darling boy, that I am being a weak and foolish girl, please, I beg you, although I hardly dare ask since I fear that, finding yourself in a new place and a new life, you have discovered you do not want anything of the old, or at least one part of it, the part that was me.

  Please, please write by return and set my mind at rest. Or, if it is the other, then show me some mercy and put me out of my misery.

  With love

  Caro

  My brain was in a whirl. Those words ‘written by a stranger’ cut me to the quick. How close she was to realising the truth! My subterfuge had worked but only just. I had to get rid of this stupid young woman, get her off my back, and fast, before she began to put two and two together and came up with the right answer.

  The rest of my day passed in a fog, as my mind kept returning again and again to the letter. Morgan lost patience with me more than once, saying, ‘Come on, man, pay attention. Keep your mind on the job, I’ll not have sloppy work.’ As though there was a better way to fasten some sobbing wretch into a chair! I could have strangled the man, he annoyed me so, demanding my concentration when all I wanted was to steal away and work out a scheme to divest myself of this troublesome lover. Even Jane Dove could see something was wrong, saying to me as we walked the grounds during the exercise period, ‘You have somewhere-elsed me all day.’

  At last it was evening and I watched darkness invading the grounds, great shadows stealing across the lawns, with a sigh of relief and not my usual dread. I rushed through dinner and Morgan unobjected when I departed as soon as I’d swallowed the last mouthful; I think he’d enoughed me for one day.

  Once alone, I reread the letter and considered what to do. There was only one option. I had to break all ties with Miss Adams; nothing else would serve. I had thought it might be amusing to string her along for a while, but now
I saw it would not answer. Apart from anything else, how long could I plead my injured hand as an excuse for my unfamiliar handwriting? Sooner or later the break would have to be mended. And even before that time came, with every letter there was the risk I would give myself away by perhaps not understanding something she referred to, not being able to show any knowledge of our shared life, or simply by employing an expression that Shepherd himself would never have used.

  I sat at my desk and took up my pen, beginning ‘Dear Miss Adams’. I had decided it necessaried to brutal her from the start.

  Dear Miss Adams,

  I am afraid it is with great regret that I have to tell you that unfortunately your anxiety about our future relationship is not misplaced. I wish it were not so, really I do, but that is not the case. Believe me when I say that I did truly think I loved you and thought I meant everything I said to you in our moments alone together, those little endearments you mention which I can no longer bring myself to utter (I was beginning to enjoy myself now!).

  I think it was the train wreck that changed my mind. The brush with death made me examine my life and the course it was upon and see that it would not do. For me, at least, it was a happy accident because it stopped me blundering into a situation which would have ended in disaster for us both and I am certain would, at some future time, have hurt you far more than will this letter now.

  I end by thanking you for your past affection for me and with great sadness at the unhappiness this will doubtless cause you, through no fault of your own. I hope and pray that any such distress will be short-lived. You are a wonderful girl and someday will make some fortunate man very happy, only just not me, your obedient servant

  J

  I put down my pen with a sigh of satisfaction. It was as though a great weight had lifted from me, or the shadow of some evil angel had passed over me and sought another victim. I read the letter through. It left her no room for manoeuvre. It did not matter if she chose to write back; there would be no need for me to reply, nothing odd about my silence. I wrote her address on the envelope, congratulating myself on the knowledge it was the last time I would ever have to do so. The matter was over and done with and Caroline Adams was now no more than a footnote in Shepherd’s history.