The Girl Who Couldn't Read

by John Harding

  ‘But, sir,’ I said, ‘I think I’m making progress and it would be unfair to stop the thing out of hand without assessing it.’

  ‘Unfair?’ His eyes bulged. ‘You think it would be unfair? I call it damned unfair to let another man do the work you’re paid for, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I hung my head meekly. Experience had taught me it was better to humble myself when he was in such a mood than to argue with him, which only made him more irate.

  He recommenced his pacing. Eventually he stopped and stood staring out the window at the snow, which was still falling fast, his back to me. ‘All right, you have a point. It’s no use stopping it in a moment of annoyance. I will inspect your progress first. I will expect to notice measurable improvements, though. For one thing, the girl must not be talking gibberish. And for another –’ here he turned and looked me in the eye again, ‘for another, I expect that she will – at least a little – be able to read.’

  There was a hint of a smirk as he said this. I could feel his eyes laughing at me. My heart sank inside me. There was a chance I might help Jane Dove to moderate her speech before him, but it would impossible me to persuade her to attempt to learn to read, and, even if I could, to accomplish it within the very short time that would be all I would be allowed before he examined her. He was hardly going to let me extend the trial another month.

  ‘Very well, sir,’ I replied. ‘And when would you like to see the girl?’

  ‘I don’t want it to take up any more working time than it already has, and certainly I can’t waste mine on what I know to be such a … such a … lost cause. Let’s say Sunday, shall we?’

  I tried not to look too crestfallen as I nodded agreement. It was already Tuesday.

  18

  It was not until the afternoon exercise that I was able to see Jane Dove again. It was not the best situation for a serious discussion, especially one I knew would be unwelcome to her; we were both shivering, she in her thin dress with only a knitted shawl over it as an acknowledgement that winter had truly announced its arrival and I for my part with no coat. I had only a muffler, which Eva, who had seen my plight, had given me, and an extra undershirt, undergarments being the only items of clothing Shepherd had been abundantly equipped with.

  In an effort to keep warm, we walked briskly along the footpaths the gardeners had cleared early on, a task that fully occupied them with the continuing heavy snow. After exchanging a few pleasantries with my charge, when I scarcely knew what I was saying, much less what she replied, I stopped abruptly and stood stamping my feet and clapping my arms about me in an effort to keep my blood circulating. ‘Jane, I have to talk to you about something serious,’ I said.

  Her face fell. ‘What is it, sir? You are leaving this place. I knew it, I felt it coming.’

  I managed a smile. ‘No, no, not that at all, although, of course, I shall have to leave one day, but not yet awhile, I hope.’

  It was her turn to smile.

  I plunged on. ‘But unless you can help me – help yourself, that is – then it will amount to the same thing as far as you are concerned.’ I told her about Morgan’s ultimatum.

  She became very agitated, twisting the ends of her shawl round and round in her hands. ‘It impossibles, I cannot do it.’

  ‘I know it’s a tall order by Sunday, but you’re intelligent and quick-witted. You’ll be able to pick up enough reading to placate him.’

  She looked me straight in the eye. ‘No, sir, you misunderstand. When I say it impossibles I am not talking of my capabilities, but of what is allowed. I am unpermitted to learn to read.’

  ‘Who says? Who forbade it? Whoever it was cares so little about you they have left you here to rot.’

  Confusion took hold of her features. ‘I – I can’t remember who, sir. When I try to think of it a fog descends upon my mind. I can see nothing. I only know that if I am discovered reading, I will lose –’

  ‘What? What will you lose?’

  She hung her head and shook it slightly and whispered so soft I could scarce hear, ‘Everything.’

  I resumed walking. It was the only way I could manage to control my frustration. My face was suddenly hot in spite of the freezing weather. I was moving so quickly now she had to trot alongside me to keep up.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘wait a minute. I have an idea.’

  I stopped and resentfulled her one. ‘Well?’ I was not hopeful.

  Her cheeks were red. Her panting breath turned to mist in the cold air. ‘I will pretend I can read. That will be all right.’

  ‘How can you pretend? How do you think you’ll be able to fool an educated man like Dr Morgan?’

  She looked arch, something I had never seen in her before. ‘Oh, but sir, I am very good at pretending. And I think I know a way it may be done.’

  The whole idea was so fantastical; I didn’t even bother to ask what she had in mind. Instead I sought to end the discussion by pointing out the – to me – obvious flaw in the stratagem as a whole. ‘If you pretend to read, will it not just be the same as actually being able to? If whatever relative of yours who banned it ever shows up here, they’ll be told you can read.’

  ‘Yes, but in that case, sir, I will not need to remain here any longer and will have no further need to please Dr Morgan. And so you will be able to reveal our ruse, that I can’t read after all, but that it was something we worked between us to save me from being put back with all those mad people when I am not mad.’

  I could not help the sigh of exasperation that escaped me. The number of patients here who had told me they were the only ones who weren’t crazy! ‘And how do you propose to bring it off, eh? Tell me that?’

  She smiled and I could not help noticing how fetching she looked, as flirtatious as some society women I’d known. ‘I will learn a passage from a book, get it by heart and then I will reel it off while looking at the book and appearing to read from it. Dr Morgan won’t suspect a thing, because it won’t even occur to him that someone might do that. I will learn perhaps a couple of really long passages. I have a wonderful memory, sir, you will see.’

  ‘Jane,’ I said. ‘You can’t remember who you are. You can’t even remember your own name.’

  There was a long pause. ‘Florence,’ she said.

  ‘What? You’re telling me that’s your name? You knew all along?’

  She looked down at her feet, avoiding my eyes. ‘It came to me just now. When you said that, about me not being able to remember it, it just jumped into my head.’

  She lifted her eyes and looked straight at me, defianting me one. We stood eyeballing each other. I again had the feeling she was lying but somehow I could not bring myself to challenge her.

  ‘All right, Florence,’ I said. ‘This is indeed a breakthrough. When I tell Morgan, he will have to admit I’m making progress with you. It will help our cause.’

  She turned away and resumed walking slowly, looking at the path upon which fresh snow had fallen even as we talked. ‘I – I would rather you said nothing to him about the name. I uncertain it is what I’m called. Perhaps it came to mind simply because it was a name I happened to like.’

  I impatiented her a sigh. ‘But, don’t you see, it’s just the sort of ammunition we need.’

  She stopped and gave me a look as icy as the weather. ‘If you tell anyone else, I shall deny I ever said it.’

  ‘Well then, on your own head be it. I can do nothing for you. You will have to embrace your fate.’ And I stalked off, furious with her. All the way back to the building I thought how stupid and ungrateful she was, after all I’d done for her, to throw away her chances of recovery because of some silly secret she felt bound to keep.

  Later, though, on my own, in my room before dinner, when my heat had cooled, I began to think that perhaps she had something after all. Maybe there was a way in which we might fool Morgan. I loved the audacious duplicity of it, the cleverness of the deceit we might practise upon him, and by the time I left my room and
was hurrying to Jane’s, my heart was thumping in my chest with excitement.

  What surprised me was that she seemed to be expecting me. Oh, she made a good show of being humble and contrite after her earlier defiance, but I noticed she did not offer to give ground. I behaved as if nothing had happened and pretended I had not been cruel to her. ‘I’ve been thinking over what you said, about pretending to read. How did you think to work it?’

  ‘Well, sir, we will take this book, Great Expectations, and you will read the opening part of it to me, a little at a time. I will repeat what you say after you and we will do this until I can say it on my own without you prompting me, and then we will move on to the next little bit and so on until I have a sizeable chunk I can say from memory, enough to fool Dr Morgan.’

  ‘That’s good, very good. But what if he’s not convinced? What if he selects another passage for you to look at?’

  ‘I have thought of that possibility, too, sir. To this end, we will break the spine of the book. After my reading of the beginning, if he wants more, I will close the book and hand it back to him. When he opens it, it will naturally fall to that page.’

  ‘Hmm, I’m not sure I like that. What if it doesn’t?’

  ‘Then, sir, as I take the book from him, I will turn to the window as if to get better light and let it fall to that page while my body is blocking his view. He will never notice it’s a different page.’

  I stared at her a long moment.

  ‘Well, sir, what do you think?’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you are a crafty little minx.’

  ‘Oh, sir,’ she said, with a nod of her head to one side, ‘I will take that as a great compliment, coming as it does from you.’

  It was only later, after dinner, when I was alone and those words of hers came back to me, that I asked myself what exactly it was she had meant by them.

  After that we went at it with a will, working on the opening of Great Expectations and a passage from later in the book when Pip meets Herbert Pocket in London and is instructed on the manners of a gentleman, a passage which had made her laugh when I first read it to her. We broke the back of the book in that place. She was a quick learner. We did as she’d suggested, I giving her a sentence or part of it at a time and then she sitting beside me and repeating it parrot fashion until she seemed to have it by heart.

  Of course, the opening chapter of Great Expectations is one of the greatest pieces of writing in all literature, in part because it has such natural rhythm, which makes it easier to memorise than most bits of prose. But even so, she amazed me because she was so good at retaining what she had heard. She said she kept repeating the words over and over to herself when she was alone, and this was evident because I found that at the start of each new session she seemed better schooled in her pieces than when we had ended the time before. When she was ready to put all the separate sentences together and to attempt to speak the whole passage in one go, she insisted on sitting holding the book in front of her, ‘reading’ from it as she would do for Morgan. I was most impressed at the way she did this, for very cleverly she thought to run her eyes from side to side, as if they were following the lines of words on the page as she had seen me do, to give the effect that she was actually reading rather than staring at a load of meaningless symbols and parroting something learned by heart. What an actress, I told myself, to be so naturally attuned to stagecraft, to have imagined herself so wholly in the part.

  It was a frantic week and we spent every moment we could on our task, with me squeezing a few minutes here, a quarter of an hour there, from my busy timetable to cloister myself with her and work away at it. I confess I felt quite exhausted from the stress of it all, whereas she seemed strangely serene, utterly confident in her ability to bring the thing off.

  At last Sunday came and I prepared for the day with a sinking heart. As I dressed I couldn’t help thinking of all that was at stake. If Jane or Florence or whoever this strange girl was didn’t manage this seemingly impossible feat, then my position here might be ruined. It would be obvious to Morgan that she and I were in cahoots, that I had tried to deceive him. How then might he begin to perceive me? Might the scales fall from his eyes as he realised I was not the straightforward person he had thought me to be? Might he suspect me of falsehood in other areas too? Might he begin to wonder about my identity altogether? On that frosty morning I shivered as I thought on all this and, I tell you, it wasn’t only because of the cold.

  19

  The weekends were a kind of holiday in the hospital, if only in the sense that we took a break from routine. After Saturday morning there were no therapies, although sometimes if a patient became troublesome she might have to be put under restraint for the protection of herself and others, but this did not need either Morgan or me. Technically we were off duty from midday Saturday onwards, although the rule was that one of us was always on hand in case some emergency arose.

  In the afternoon the patients’ stultifying routine was relaxed. In the day room the cover was taken off an old upright piano that stood in one corner and a member of the staff would play popular tunes upon it, and sometimes patients too, the ones who could be trusted not to damage the instrument. The pianist would play dance tunes and the patients were permitted to dance with one another, or on their own if they wished, as some of them did, standing swaying about in time to the music, lost in whatever worlds their minds inhabited.

  Observing these sessions was like watching dolls come to life. Deadpan expressions became animated, sullen looks turned to smiles, lifeless eyes shone brightly. There was a hubbub about the place that gladdened the heart to see and convinced me that the philosophy of Moral Treatment was right; if we only treated these poor women with kindness and made an effort to engage them in real life, they would respond by becoming so much more human, more like their former healthy selves, and have a better chance of being cured.

  Of course, it was not all plain sailing. Often one of the women would grow over-excited by the dancing, the lack of restraint and the noise, and play up or become hysterical. Sometimes a collision on the dance floor would lead to an argument or even a physical fight. There were disputes over the piano and squabbles about which tune should be played next. All of this was ammunition for Morgan, when I ventured to suggest that an improvement came over the patients with the more relaxed regime, to argue back that it was all right for a limited time but would always eventually end in tears.

  On Sunday morning there was a service in the hospital chapel that everyone was expected to attend, staff and patients alike. Morgan himself read the lesson in something of a drone that I’m sure was calculated to be soporific, so as not to arouse the emotions of his audience but to maintain them on a manageable level. So well did he succeed that his discourse was always punctuated by snores from the inmates. Afterwards we sang hymns, with one of the attendants accompanying on the chapel organ, old favourites like ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ and ‘Rock of Ages’. There was a certain lack of reserve in the way these were rendered, with many of the women overly lusty in ringing out the words and others so out of tune as to provide myriad descants.

  Luncheon was much looked forward to by the patients, for they were given proper soup followed by some decent roast meat, not a great quantity but not fatty or rancid like the normal fare, and there were a few vegetables too. The meal was always consumed with a lively buzz of conversation, which was not only on account of the food itself, but also in anticipation of what was to follow, because that was when visitors were allowed.

  On this particular occasion, it was almost as if the patients’ Sunday excitement had transmitted itself to Morgan, so much did he seem to be looking forward to his examination of Jane Dove. I swear even his moustache was bristling with anticipation, and he was like some animal eager to devour its prey as we walked along the corridor to her room.

  When we entered, Jane was sitting in one of her armchairs. She stood up awkwardly and dropped him a half curtsy. Morg
an nodded at her and then looked about at the arrangement of the room, the pictures, the sorry-looking furniture, the battered armchairs, the scratched table, the well-trodden rug, and said, ‘Well, this is a surprise, I’m sure. I had no idea we were running a luxury hotel here, absolutely no idea at all.’

  I managed a thin smile at this; it was better to indulge his humour than challenge him, which would only upset him and prejudice him even more against poor Jane. I looked at her for signs of nervousness and was relieved to see she appeared calm and in control of herself. It was a complete contrast to the turbulence I felt within my own breast, but then it was always much more difficult to rely on someone else rather than yourself; you never knew when they might let you down.

  Morgan gestured to Jane to resume her seat and then settled himself in the other armchair facing her. He gave her a broad smile. ‘I understand from Dr Shepherd that you have made the most marvellous progress under his new regimen.’ His voice dripped sarcasm.

  ‘Sir, I have tried my best to improve myself,’ she said innocently, as if taking him at face value.

  As I stood behind Morgan where he could not see me, my jaw must have dropped open. I had never found humility to be one of Jane’s attributes.

  ‘Very well then, let me hear you read.’

  Jane looked about her as if in search of something suitable. On the desk were The Complete Works and Great Expectations. I walked over to it and picked up the latter and held it up, ‘What about this, Jane? Can you read a little of this for Dr Morgan, do you think?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I will try.’ She looked sweetly at Morgan. ‘But you must make allowances for any mistakes, sir. I have not long learned.’

  Morgan nodded. It was obvious he anticipated some half-baked disaster. I handed Jane the book and she opened it at the beginning and began. ‘My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue …’

  Her voice was clear and she ‘read’ with great expression. What was especially clever – a thing we had not worked on together – was that every few words she would stumble over a word and then correct herself, or pause and stare hard at the book, her lips moving to herself as though she was trying to spell out the letters before continuing. I stole a glance at Morgan and saw, as he watched, the smugness vanish from his face and something akin to admiration replace it. Outside we could hear the chatter and laughter of the visitors who had just arrived on the boat. It somehow magnified the quiet and tension in the room.