Her lip trembled, her eyes filled and a tear rolled down one of her cheeks. ‘I do not want to think of that,’ she said, the last word almost lost in a great sob that shook her whole thin frame.
‘Jane, it has to be thought of. We must act now before it is too late.’
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘What must I do?’
‘You must invent a past for yourself. Start thinking about it; imagine the life you would like to have now, if you weren’t here. Think of the house you might have lived in, picture the rooms there, think of little details of furnishings and so on. Make up a family for yourself, the people who lived there with you.’
Her eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘I will do it, sir! I will try to imagine a life I might have had. I will lie in my bed tonight with my eyes tight shut and picture how it might have been and then I will tell you tomorrow.’
‘We only need an outline to begin with, a kind of frame upon which we can hang more and more details. Then we will have to come up with a story of what happened to lead you to be wandering the streets of the city alone and a reason for why your family no longer exists. The aim will be to construct a realistic former life we can offer to Morgan.’
She was smiling now. ‘Oh, sir, it’s a brilliant plan! I shall love the making up. By tomorrow, I promise you, I will have a past.’
The following day was one of those gifts from nature that make you grateful to be alive, especially if you have no right to be. The sky was clear blue and the sun shone bright – a winter sun with little warmth, it was true, but a bauble of cheer and hope nonetheless. Everything stood out sharp the way it does in good light: the skeletal branches of the trees, the very brick of the building. I looked out my window at the snowman Jane Dove had made the day before. She had fashioned his beady eyes and wide mouth from stones and he seemed to be smiling up at me. I had a great surge of optimism as I returned his smile. It was all working out well. On such a day I could even believe my stratagem to free poor Jane would do the trick. I was safe and prospering here for the time being. I had the plan for my escape in place. And then, just as I was thinking this, my eye caught a movement – a shadow of something passing overhead, a moving speck upon the virgin snow – and looking up, I saw a solitary rook flying toward the river. A shiver ran through me and suddenly the day seemed bleak and cold. O’Reilly, she was the rook. I had to have a ruse to deal with her but I could think of nothing. I knew only that I could not leave a hostage to fortune. Everything must be perfect.
The rook disappeared over the horizon and with it went the momentary fear I’d suffered. I would take care of O’Reilly, I felt sure. Something would occur; it always did. What could be more hopeless than being on a train en route to the death house? Who could have foreseen that a train wreck would save me, and yet it had happened. I could not believe I’d been spared only to perish because of an interfering busybody.
I was whistling as I entered Jane Dove’s room and she seemed as cheerful as I.
‘Well, Jane, how goes it? Are you a woman with a past now?’
She did not seem to get the joke but replied innocently, ‘I am becoming so, sir. I have been awake half the night thinking of it. It was very strange. When I made up one thing, another would jump into my mind and then another. At first they seemed unconnected, but then they began to fit together, like the pieces of a jigsaw, although there are still some holes that I can’t seem to fill.’
‘Don’t worry about that for now. It’s best not to rush this but to let it form gradually, otherwise your story will seem too artificial, too contrived, and in that case it won’t convince. Tell me what you have so far.’
‘My name is Florence.’
‘Yes, you have told me so already. Florence what?’
She looked at me suspiciously. She suspicioned me one. ‘Just Florence at present, sir. And I lived in a large house.’
‘How large? The sort of house you see on a street in town?’
She laughed. ‘Oh no, sir, much, much bigger. As big as this hospital. Why, even the library is one hundred and four of my shoed feet long and thirty-seven wide. The house has many rooms, and yet nobody lives there but my brother and me.’
‘You have a brother?’
‘Yes, he is called Giles and is three years younger than me.’
‘And how old are you?’
She hesitated and looked away. ‘I – I unremember, sir.’
‘You must be sixteen.’
‘You think so, sir?’
‘No, I have no idea how old you are. I mean you must say you’re sixteen. I don’t think anyone will believe you’re older. But you have to say you’re sixteen.’
‘Why? What does it matter?’
‘Because at sixteen you’re reckoned to be able to fend for yourself. If you say you’re younger, even if Morgan agrees to let you go, he will simply hand you over to the authorities. You’ll be shut up in an orphanage. If you’re sixteen, you can be set free.’
‘All right, I am sixteen.’
‘What else have you “remembered”? What of your parents?’
‘My parents are both dead, sir. I am under the protection of my uncle, whom I never see because the house is in the country in a remote place and he lives a long way off in New York City. It has a long drive rooked by an avenue of fine oaks. There is a man who looks after the horses and the grounds, and there is a housekeeper.’
‘Names?’
‘He is called John and she is called Mrs Grouse. There is a maid named Mary and a cook named Meg who bakes delicious cakes.’
It all came out very pat; the way she answered my questions was so slick, I thought, this girl should be a writer – except she can’t even read, let alone write – because making up a story comes so natural to her. She relates everything as though she is looking at it with her mind’s eye and believes it to be true.
‘Is there no one else in this great house? No one to look after you?’
‘I told you, sir, we have Mrs Grouse and the servants.’
‘What about your education?’
She bridled. ‘You know very well I have none.’
‘But why don’t you have one? Morgan will want to know.’
‘I have told you it is unallowed. My uncle loved a woman who got herself all booked and cultured up and surpassed him in both and then someone-elsed.’
‘I see.’ I thought, I will have to do something about the way she talks. If she carries on like this to Morgan, he will still think her mad. ‘So he wouldn’t allow you and your brother –’
‘Giles, sir.’
‘On account of too much learning having spoiled, as he saw it, his love affair, your uncle wouldn’t provide an education for you and Giles.’
‘Oh no, sir, just me. Because my uncle thought the fault was in letting women be educated. It unapplied to Giles.’
‘So Giles was, what, at a school?’
‘For a little, after the first governess died.’
‘You had a governess who –’
‘Not me, sir, Giles –’
‘Giles had a governess who died?’
‘Tragicked on the lake.’
‘This would be the lake on which you went ice skating.’
‘The very same, sir. What a memory you have!’ She had a mocking smile as she said this.
‘And how did she, um, tragick?’
‘A boating accident, sir. She fell in the water and drowned, poor thing.’
I confess I was sitting there stunned with admiration at how she had thought the whole thing through in just one night and constructed an odd – and yet precisely because of its singularity – convincing narrative.
‘And that was the end of Giles’s education, I presume?’
‘Oh, no, sir. There was another governess. Or it may have been the same one …’
She bit her lip and looked up at me anxiously, anxioused me one.
‘What do you mean? How could it have been the same one when the woman was dead?’
&nbs
p; She looked at me earnestly. ‘Tell me, sir, do you believe in ghosts?’
‘Do I –?’ I held up my hand. ‘Jane, Jane, stop now. This is all getting a bit crazy.’
Her whole body bridled at this.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘wrong word. What I mean is if you start talking about ghosts, Morgan will think it’s a sign of madness. You need to rein in your imagination a little. You’re getting too carried away. This isn’t some penny dreadful, some sensational novel you’re inventing. It has to sound like a real life. In many ways, the duller the better.’
Her eyes were on the floor. I could not tell what she was thinking. She looked up and said, ‘It was just how it came to me, sir, like a story I was being told.’
‘I can see that and I think you’ve come up with something wonderful, but the main thing is to make it credible, not to entertain. Now, there is one thing in your “life” that is very unusual, and even perhaps, slightly fantastic, and that’s the business of your uncle forbidding you to learn to read and write, although on the other hand, even in this day and age there are plenty of people who believe things not too dissimilar, that a woman’s place is in the kitchen and so on. But that is enough oddness for one person’s life. We need to keep everything else normal. For instance, was it necessary to drown the governess?’
‘Oh yes, sir!’ It came out straight away and she put a hand over her mouth immediately it was said, shutting the stable door. ‘I mean, that was the way it happened in my imagination. You are right. For our purposes she does not need to die.’
‘Good. She can stay and teach Giles, then.’
‘Very well.’
‘Is that everything? Have you thought of an explanation of how you came to be here?’
‘No, sir. This was as far as I got. The thinkery of it tired me out. I’m sorry.’
I raised my hands in protest. ‘Don’t apologise. You’ve done amazingly well. In just one night you’ve created an identity for yourself, a believable one.’
‘You think it will do, sir?’
‘As far as it goes, yes. But at some point we will have to move the story forward. We will have to explain how you got from your life in that big old house to being found wandering around in a city. We need a story for that.’
‘I will try again tonight.’
‘No, don’t,’ I said. ‘There’s no rush. It’s important to do the thing properly. If we go off half-cocked, Morgan will smell a rat. What I would like you to do now is to concentrate on that life you have invented. I want you to walk around that great house in your mind, to see every detail of the furnishings, to invent conversations with the governess and the cook, to imagine what you did every day. It’s what actors do when they take on a role. They try to imagine what it is like to be the person they are playing. They invent a story for the character’s past and so almost come to be the person.’
‘Goodness, sir, you know a lot of things. One would begin to think you were an actor yourself, to hear you talk of it.’ Her eyes were wide-eyed with innocent admiration, hero worship even, as she looked at me.
I shrugged. I did not want her thinking too much along that line. It was a little too close for comfort. ‘Oh, not really. It’s common knowledge, and I’ve heard actors talk about such things. Anyway, I must be going. Now remember what I’ve said. Don’t try to force things. Just close your eyes and wander round that house and become the Florence who lived there. When you can live and breathe her, we’ll work on the next bit of the plot together.’
And so began a new phase of our existence. Every afternoon when I accompanied Jane on her exercise walk I would say, ‘And what has Florence been doing today?’ and she would recount the activities of her alter ego as if they had really happened and were part of her own history. She had a knack of invention and her peculiar use of words had a way of painting pictures for the listener, so it felt you were seeing the things she described before your very eyes.
She invented this character named Theo, a neighbour’s son, about her own age, whom she described as a great gangling heron of a boy who could not be trusted in a drawing room because of a congenital clumsiness, and yet – and here’s what made him so much more real – he was transformed the moment he put on skates and stepped onto ice. It was he who taught her to skate one day after she insisted they must meet outside in order to protect the furnishings of her house, to which she now had given a name, Blithe. They skated around the lake behind the house together and this ungainly boy Theo ‘gracefulled like a swan’ and earned her admiration.
As the days passed Theo came more and more into the narrative. He fell madly in love with her and, fancying himself a great poet, bombarded her with romantic verse, which was actually the most awful doggerel, of which she sometimes made up examples, such as one snatch that went ‘what boy on earth could be so dense as not to madly love Florence?’.
This poor boy ‘poetried’ her in pursuit of a kiss, she said, which she never granted, not so much because she found him unattractive but because she could not find it within herself to reward bad verse. It was only later, when I was alone, some time after I had parted from her on the day she told me this, that I wondered at her natural instinct, that she knew bad verse when she heard it. Then I thought, but when might she have heard good verse?
And at that point I slapped my forehead and broke into a laugh. Why now she had fooled me! I had been so drawn in by the narrative she had built – helped in places by me, it’s true – that I found myself taking it for fact and imagined it as her actual history. But it wasn’t, it was all a fiction. Who knew what had happened in her real past, the one she couldn’t remember? It was perfectly possible that in that other unremembered life she had had real verse read to her all the time, by a relative perhaps, and had developed a discerning ear, able to distinguish good from bad.
This incident convinced me, as November gave way to December, that her account of her life was now so solid that there were no chinks in it and that it would fool even Morgan. It was not ready to take to him, however, for one bit was missing. We had no plausible explanation of how Florence had got from her life at Blithe to where she was now. What had led to her leaving that earlier, seemingly idyllic life and going mad? How had she left the house in its remote rural location and ended up wandering the streets of the city?
There were other questions that needed addressing too. Where was her uncle? Couldn’t he be traced and contacted and summoned to take her back? Obviously not, because there was no uncle, there was the rub. So something must have happened to him. The most likely story would be that he’d died. But how? And if he had, why had Florence been left alone? Either she must have had other relatives who would have – and would now – take her in, or else she had none, in which case wouldn’t she have been heiress to the fine house and the fortune that likely went with it? And where was little Giles, her brother? I suggested to Jane this last difficulty could be easily overcome; we would simply uninvent the boy, remove him from the account altogether because he wasn’t necessary to it. At this, though, she became extremely agitated and kept saying, ‘No, no, no, we cannot do that. It impossibles to have everything else without Giles.’ No matter how I conveyed the avoidable problem this created, she could not be persuaded and so the boy was allowed to live on, an additional encumbrance.
Try as we might, we were not able to produce a scenario to explain what had happened to overturn Florence’s life so dramatically. More and more we felt ourselves defeated by it and gradually, as the days wore on toward Christmas, we began to spend less and less time on it and retreat again into the book I was reading her.
27
The hospital now was transformed from its everyday drab and dreary appearance. The attendants had been busy putting up paper chains and tinsel, which produced a sad kind of cheerfulness; it was so strange, so at odds with the place the rest of the year round. In the day room, one of the patients who could play the piano had begun practising carols ready for an entertainment that wa
s granted the inmates every year on Christmas Day, and when she struck up a tune many of them would accompany her by singing the words – or in some cases alternative words of their own – with varying musical success. Mostly they mumbled or croaked and were dreadfully out of tune, but some could sing beautifully and on one occasion as I walked through the room I was stopped dead in my tracks when a lone voice rang out the words of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’, clear as a bell on a bright, frosty morning. It caught you like a fist plunged into your chest and throttling your heart. It choked off your breath and made tears spring to your eyes. I was helpless while it continued. It seemed to sum up every hope in the world, and in that lay the pity of it, that someone could give pour forth such optimism while imprisoned there.
Christmas Day dawned bright and clear, which further lifted the mood in the hospital. There was an undercurrent of expectation, as though some atavistic memory had been stirred in the inmates of Christmases past, an excitement at what the festive season would bring, although in truth there was precious little for them to look forward to. Lunch was a stingy treat. There was lentil and bacon soup, followed by roast chicken in parsimonious portions, enough to tease the appetite but not to satisfy it. There were extra potatoes and even boiled vegetables, things never normally seen here, and jugs of gravy, the latter regarded as such a delicacy that the attendants had their work cut out preventing some of the diners from picking up the jugs and quaffing them as if they were beer.
When lunch was over, the inmates repaired to the day room, where the pianist began to work her way through her repertoire of carols, which were sung by a small choir made up of a selection of patients who could sing well and some of the attendants, although the performance was naturally accompanied by some of the audience who joined in, often with cacophonous results. Still, the atmosphere was jolly and, after contributing to the singing ourselves a little, Morgan and I retired to the staff dining room for a late lunch.
It was a sumptuous affair of roast goose, the first such meal I’d had in a year or more, and I tucked into it with relish. We drank a fine red wine and Morgan grew so relaxed that he called for a second bottle, which we began to work our way through steadily. Under the influence of the alcohol, all my anxieties, all the nervous tension of my scheming, melted away and I felt myself caught up in the warm feeling of the season as I looked at Morgan, who sat rosy-cheeked opposite me, regaling me with anecdotes from his distant college days, and beyond him at the greetings-card scene outside and Jane Dove’s snowman standing sentry in the radiant sunlight in the place he’d occupied for weeks now.