The Girl Who Couldn't Read

by John Harding

  As I stared at him, I had the sense of something being different, something about him that was not right. He did not seem to be the same person he had been before. At first I could not put my finger upon it. Then I saw there was something odd about his nose – that is, the stick Jane had put there to represent it. It was no longer pert as it had been but was drooping onto the line of stones that were his mouth. His eyes were strange, too. The two pieces of coal that formed them had slid down, giving him the look of a mournful clown. My chest was tight and I could not breathe. My stomach was an empty pit in spite of all the food I’d just eaten. I felt a terror I did not understand. And then, all at once, I did.

  I realised Morgan had stopped talking. I tried to gather my wits together. He was staring at me. ‘Good God, man, what is it? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  I almost laughed when he said that, except I seemed to have lost the power of uttering a sound. I pushed my chair back from the table and scrambled to my feet, only to find my legs would not support me and I had to hang on to the edge of the table.

  ‘What is it?’ Morgan said again. ‘Are you feeling ill? Have you had too much wine?’

  I ignored him and stumbled toward the door and somehow staggered through it. I hurried along the corridor and out the main door and nearly fell over. The surface of the snow was slick and slippery now. It had not been before. I slid and tottered along the front of the building and reached the snowman. Behind me I could hear Morgan calling me to stop. I looked the snowman in the face and he seemed to be mocking me. I put the palm of my hand on his cheek and let out a sob. I watched as a teardrop of water ran down the length of his nose and dripped to the floor. It was true. He was melting.

  Morgan was beside me now. ‘What’s the matter with you, Shepherd? You’re behaving most strangely.’

  ‘It can’t be! It can’t! It’s not meant to be happening for weeks yet. It simply can’t be true.’

  But it was. The thaw had come.

  Morgan put his arm around my shoulders, in a surprisingly tender way, and turned me about face so I was no longer looking at the snowman, then steered me back toward the building. It was growing dark. In the dead silence I could hear the drip drip of water from the branches of the pine trees we passed. As we reached the open front door I turned to Morgan and said, ‘The freeze is supposed to last until February, isn’t it? You told me so; you said it always lasted.’

  He gave me a bland smile, appeasing me in my sudden madness. ‘Well, I was going on past experience. I’m not an expert on weather. The freeze usually does last until then, but it’s not unknown for the temperature to rise before. It’s very rare, I grant you. The weather is unseasonably warm today, but whether this thaw will continue or not is anybody’s guess. Let’s hope it does, eh?’

  I stared at him as though he was mad.

  Inside, I gradually came to my senses, enough to worry about what I might have said. I went over everything carefully in my mind. I could not be entirely sure but I was fairly certain I’d not given anything away. Back in the staff dining room, Morgan sat me down and poured a glass of brandy, which he offered to me. I was about to take it, as I was shaking and in dire need of something to quiet my nerves and restore my spirits, but had the sudden good sense to wave it away. ‘Thank you, sir, but no. I think I may have taken too much in that way already. I’m not used to it, you know. My family were hot on temperance.’

  I don’t know what made that jump into my mind but it was fortuitous; it gained Morgan’s sympathy. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know. And here I was, plying you with drink all through lunch. Should have known better with your Quaker leanings.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, sir. I should have known better myself and gone more easy. I cannot apologise enough for my behaviour. I don’t know what came over me.’

  He waved this away. ‘No need for sackcloth and ashes, old man. We’ve all taken a bit too much at one time or another. No harm done.’ He studied me for a moment and then glanced out the window. ‘Something about that snowman, was it? Something that upset you?’

  ‘I – I think it reminded me of a clown,’ I said. ‘I could never abide them as a child. They terrified me. Even today you couldn’t get me to a circus to save my life.’

  ‘Really?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Most strange. Wonder what could have caused that.’ He peered at me with a forensic interest.

  I was in a state of terror. I managed to put on some appearance of normality for Morgan but it wasn’t easy. All the while the steady dripping of water from the eaves was a torture that made it difficult to concentrate on anything else. Every so often there would be the soft sound of a heap of snow sliding from the roof and hitting the ground.

  Eventually I pleaded a headache on account of the wine and slipped away from him. I needed to be alone to try to think of a way out of the fix I was in, to devise some means of escape before the snow all turned to water and revealed the late Caroline Adams to the world.

  After dark, I went outside and surveyed the grounds as far as I could see by starlight. Now that the sun had gone down, it had turned colder. Was it wishful thinking or could I detect an easing-off in the frequency of the dripping? I walked around the building and stared in the direction in which Miss Adams lay awaiting her resurrection. The light was too feeble to see that far, but I was relieved that the deeper drifts of snow seemed hardly to have diminished at all. I reckoned Miss Adams had a good three feet on top of her and I figured it would take quite some time to melt. I guessed I had a day or two at least, even if the temperature remained this high.

  As I went back inside, it occurred to me that in my distress I had neglected to look in on Jane Dove, who had had a lonely day of it. I had suggested she might put on her old patient’s uniform and join the rest of the inmates in their celebrations of the day, but she had been horrified at the idea. ‘I never want to return to that, sir,’ she said fiercely, ‘not even for a day. Not for an hour, or a minute or a single second. I am not one of them.’ And so she had spent Christmas Day on her own, the only seasonal note for her being Dickens’s Christmas Books, which I had found in the library and left with her, that she might look through the illustrations. It was what I found her doing now, sitting by her window.

  ‘My snowman is melting.’ It was the first thing she said to me and it made me wince.

  ‘Well, he was never going to last for ever,’ I said, putting a brave face on it. ‘Though I confess I had hoped to have him with us a bit longer than this.’ I stood beside her and we both gazed out the window at the diminished figure outside. It was a grim sight.

  She lifted up her book. ‘Have you time to read me some of this? I cannot make out the story, try as I might, although I can see it ends with a Christmas meal.’ I saw it was A Christmas Carol.

  ‘Not now, Jane. Something more important has come up. We need to lay plans.’

  ‘Is it a bad thing? Your face seems to tell me so.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I had a discussion with Dr Morgan about the recovery of your memory and I’m afraid he did not react in the way we had hoped.’

  The book slipped from her grasp and fell to the floor. Neither of us attempted to pick it up. ‘But surely he must agree that my loss of memory is the chief reason I have been put here?’

  I took a turn around the room, in part to help my thinking but also to hide my face from her. ‘You would think so, but that is not the way he sees it. He insists it was merely one factor amongst many that made him judge you insane. He says it would not have been sufficient on its own to make you a patient here.’

  ‘B-but how can that be?’

  As I made the turn in my walk and looked up at her, I found her eyes boring straight into me. It was like being cross-examined in court. I could only look down again. I continued pacing.

  ‘But, sir, it’s not just my memory that has improved. I can read now. Has he forgot that?’

  I stopped and faced her. ‘I put that to him, but he refused to be moved. H
e said most people can read, including most madmen. It is not an indication of mental health.’

  She took a moment to absorb this and then said, ‘But doesn’t it show I could take my place again in the world? That I can manage myself and be managed well enough to learn to do it? That I have made such great progress shows I am cured.’

  I stepped to her side, went down on one knee and grabbed her hand. ‘That’s just it, Jane, that’s just what I hadn’t reckoned with when we pulled the trick of pretending you could read and spent so many weeks inventing your past. Morgan doesn’t ever allow anybody to be cured. It’s against his creed. Managed sometimes, yes, but cured, no. No one ever gets out of this place. It is a life sentence without parole.’

  She flushed with anger now and pulled herself forward on the arms of her chair. ‘What has all this been for, then, this experiment with your Moral Treatment? Why did he let us waste so much time and … and … hope on that, when he never meant me to be cured?’

  ‘It was partly an indulgence toward me but mainly so he could prove me wrong and bring me to his views in order to make me more enthusiastic for his barbarous methods.’

  She sank back and tears rolled down her cheeks. She buried her face in her hands and let out a great sob.

  I watched with satisfaction. It was exactly what I had hoped for. Eventually she dropped her hands, and looked at me. ‘So the experiment is over? I am to go back amongst the others?’

  I nodded slowly. She bit her lip, fighting to hold back another fit of crying, unable to speak for what seemed an age, until at last she whispered hoarsely, ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as the holiday season is over and all the staff are back from leave. A few days.’

  She broke down again. ‘Oh, sir, I cannot stand it! I cannot bear a single day of it, I know.’

  ‘You won’t have to.’ I released her hand and stood up. ‘I am going to get you out.’

  Her head jerked up. ‘Get me out? But how?’

  ‘Escape. I will help you escape. We will leave together.’

  She stared at me. ‘But what about you? Won’t you get into trouble with Morgan? Might it not cost you your post?’

  ‘I will explain everything to you and you must do exactly as I say and play your part well to the very last detail. As for me losing my post, I intend to escape with you. I am never coming back.’

  ‘You would do that for me? But why? I do not understand why you would give up everything to help me.’

  I laughed. ‘I came here to help people because that’s what I thought the job of a doctor was, but now I find I am useless. No, worse than that, I’m only here to assist in the oppression of the poor unfortunates incarcerated here. I have no interest in remaining if I’m not doing any good. I’d be bound to quit sooner or later, and this news about you makes it, well, just a little sooner than I intended. At least this way I will save one patient; that will be something to be proud of in my whole shameful sojourn here.’

  She looked at me with something like adoration. It was the equivalent of a standing ovation. ‘Oh sir,’ she said, tears again streaming down her cheeks, ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’

  I grabbed a chair, pulled it up close to her and said in a whisper, ‘Now, here’s what you must do …’

  28

  By the time I had finished explaining my plan to Jane, it was well after the hour for the patients’ evening meal to start and it was my turn to supervise tonight. I went first to my own room, where I picked up the heavy iron poker from the grate. I took a pair of socks from their drawer and wrapped one around the ash-covered end of the poker that went into the fire and secured it by tying the other sock around it. Then I slipped the poker into the back of the waistband of my pants and pulled my jacket over it so it could not be seen. I made my way to the patients’ dining room, hoping the stiffness in my back the poker caused was not too apparent to anyone else. I paused before I went in, composing myself for what was to come. I needed to be poker-faced as well as poker-backed.

  I was met with an impudent glare from O’Reilly. ‘You’re late,’ she snapped.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs O’Reilly. I can promise you on anything you care to name that it will never, ever happen again.’ And I gave her my most winning smile. I was pleased to see how this puzzled her and how throughout the meal she continued every now and then to glance at me, trying to figure out what I was at. I maintained an easy smile, although my heart was a steam engine pounding away in my chest and the blood was singing in my temples. It was a desperate plan I had dreamed up on the spur of the moment and there were so many ways in which it could go wrong. My mind was feverishly working it through, trying to spot the inevitable flaws. There were none I could think of, but from past history I knew only too well that that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  Eventually the meal came to an end. Because of the holiday, the patients were not to be put straight to bed but were to have an hour’s singing in the day room. While the attendants got them in line and shepherded them out, I watched as in the background O’Reilly slipped away into the back corridor. I waited until the patients had gone and the room was empty, then I went through the back door to look for O’Reilly. I could hear her in the kitchen along the corridor, evidently loading the tray of food she would be taking upstairs.

  I stepped again into the disused stockroom and shut the door behind me. I was counting on O’Reilly not thinking I’d be fool enough to try the same trick twice and lock me in again, in which case all would be lost and I would swing.

  I heard her steps in the corridor and then starting up the first flight of stairs. I tiptoed from the room to the foot of the staircase, where I listened until I heard her begin to ascend to the third floor, and then, quiet as I could, I crept up to the second. There I stopped and listened again until O’Reilly’s footsteps sounded in the corridor above, about to mount the stairs to the attic. Then I abandoned all caution and took the stairs at a run. I pounded up them so fast O’Reilly had only just rounded the turn to the attic. She stopped, tray in her hands, alarmed at the sound of the oncoming footsteps.

  ‘You!’ she said, as I rushed up the bottom flight.

  ‘Yes, me!’ I hissed, and as I reached the top step, I put my hand behind me and pulled out the poker.

  ‘What do you think –’ She tried to retreat, but fell backwards against the steps. She dropped the tray, which clattered toward me, soup and water spilling everywhere, tin plates and cup and water jug ringing on the bare wooden steps. When everything had finally come to rest, we both watched spellbound as a solitary apple bounced down from step to step like a child’s ball and vanished somewhere below.

  ‘I am come to give you a treatment!’ I cried with a flourish of the poker.

  She turned and tried to scramble up the stairs, which was just the way I wanted her. I brought the poker down with all my might upon the back of her skull, so hard I could hear the crunch of bone. It was all so sudden she hadn’t even time to cry out but slumped onto the stairs with nothing more than a dull groan. I examined the back of her skull and was pleased to see the sock had not only kept it from getting ash-stained but had stopped any cutting, which wouldn’t have fitted my story. Instead of a gash there was nothing more than a large depression where the cranium had caved in.

  I put a finger to her throat and felt for a pulse. How I would have preferred to squeeze that throat and watch her eyes goggle in amazement while I pressed the life out of her, but alas it would not have answered to my purpose.

  I turned her around so she was lying on her back facing the upper flight of stairs as though she had fallen – or been pushed – backwards down them. I collected a couple of things that had been dashed from the tray when she dropped it, a piece of bread and the tin mug. I put them on the uppermost two steps, then placed the tray itself on the landing at the top, right outside the madwoman’s door, as though O’Reilly had dropped it there. It was vital it should appear that she had been at the top when she fell.

>   Just then, as I began to calm down, I became aware of a noise behind me and realised it was the madwoman shrieking on the other side of her door, no doubt agitated by the noise. I ignored her and stood on the top landing and surveyed the tableau I had created until I had satisfied myself that everything appeared correct. Returning to O’Reilly, I raked my fingernails down one of her cheeks, enough to cause a vicious-looking graze.

  I took her bunch of keys from the loop on her belt and tried them in the door in front of me until I found one that fitted the lock, although I didn’t turn it fully but left it so the door remained locked with the key in it and the rest of the bunch dangling there. Then I put my poker under my jacket again and hurried downstairs.

  The dining hall was empty and I slipped through it unseen into the front corridor. In the distance I could hear the sound of singing. I reached the main stairs without encountering anyone and took them at a gallop. I went into my room, removed the socks from the end of the poker, put them back in their drawer and restored the murder weapon to its normal place.

  29

  Once I’d more or less stopped shaking, I went down to Morgan’s office, again not meeting anyone, as by now the patients were preparing for bed and all the skeleton crew of attendants who were not on leave were seeing to them. Outside the office door, I paused and ruffled my hair. I pulled my necktie askew and, taking hold of my shirtfront, ripped it. Then I knocked on the door and opened it even as Morgan’s voice was in the middle of telling me to enter. He looked round from his seat at his desk and gasped at the dishevelled figure I must have cut.