The Girl Who Couldn't Read

  It was the girl who had given away her bread. The one who had communed silently with me a couple of days earlier. Our eyes locked again and, as before, I saw an indefinable quality in them; madness, certainly, there was no doubt of that, for there was a primitive wildness about the way they stared, but there was intelligence too. Excitement pulsed through me like electricity. Not just my old, dangerous pulse, though that was there, to be sure, because the girl was attractive in her untamed way, but more than that. I could make something of this girl; she had the necessary clay to mould; she was crazy but also bright. Only one thing held me back: the familiar stirring deep within me, the quickening of the heart, the beat of blood in my temples. What if I succumbed to my ancient troubles here? It would end up costing me everything, that much I knew.

  ‘Well?’ Morgan was suddenly beside me, tapping his foot. ‘That one? Is it to be her?’

  The question alarmed me. It was the very one I had always asked myself. All those other times. That way madness lay, and worse, I knew. Hold back, you fool, I told myself; don’t ruin things now when you are safe. Don’t do it, man, turn away now before it is too late.

  I looked at the girl. She looked back at me. She tossed back her long dark hair as though to let me see her better. Her eyes were black and defiant.

  ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘Yes, let it be her.’

  He beckoned to one of the attendants and spoke quietly to her, indicating the girl with a nod, which I took to be him asking for the patient’s name and history. After a short conference with the attendant he came back to me and said, ‘Very well, let’s go to my office and look at her records. See what you’ve got for yourself.’

  7

  Morgan turned the pages of the file. ‘Hah! Yes! I remember now. I fear you’ve given yourself a hard task. The poor girl cannot even communicate properly. Besides being mad, she’s probably mentally retarded.’

  He looked up at me and smiled, pleased as punch. The smile gradually faded as he saw he’d drawn no reaction from me. He’d expected me to be crestfallen at the news, whereas I did not believe a word of it. The girl’s brain might be damaged, true, but even if he couldn’t see it, the light of a sharp intelligence positively blazed from her eyes.

  Disappointed, he once more studied the file. ‘Hmm, let’s see, not much to go on. Found in a state of distress wandering near the railroad depot three months ago. Refuses or is unable to tell anyone her name. We gave her the name of Jane Dove. We always call the unknowns after birds, for some reason, don’t ask me why, and “Dove” seemed to suit her. No relatives have come for her. The police took her to the city asylum and she was judged mentally impaired and sent here. Origins and age unknown. She could be anything from, say, thirteen to around eighteen. Her height may make her appear older than she is, of course. She has no menses, which may be because she’s young and hasn’t started them yet or may not signify at all, because it’s common for mentally ill women to have delayed menses or for them to cease altogether.’

  ‘You said she was mentally retarded, yet her expression strikes me as intelligent,’ I ventured.

  This produced a grim smile below the little moustache. ‘Don’t mistake madness for intelligence. Mental illness often displays a certain intensity that masquerades as it. This girl is illiterate. She is unable to read even simple words and cannot write her own name. She is linguistically backward, too, although whether this is because she was born with impaired faculties or the result of her falling ill later and losing her powers of speech it’s impossible to know. Of course it doesn’t matter, either way; the end result is the same.’

  ‘She can’t talk?’

  ‘Oh yes, she can talk all right, but not in proper English. She speaks a kind of gibberish, mixes up the parts of speech, misses out certain words and so on. The staff have had problems understanding her, and she is unable to converse with the other patients, which of course has increased her isolation and not helped her condition.’

  He tossed the file onto the desk between us and I picked it up and flicked through it. There was not much to add to what he had told me. There was a copy of the police report, which gave some brief details from the patrol officer. The only interesting fact here that Morgan had omitted to tell me was that the girl had been making a nuisance of herself accosting passers and asking them to help her. Various people had tried to assist her but had subsequently found her to be not in her right mind, as she became increasingly distressed, and some Good Samaritan had gone in search of a policeman. There were her admittance papers from the city asylum. The examination report from the doctor there, all of one page, concluded that the girl was insane, and sufficiently agitated to be a danger to herself or to others, and on that basis she had been sent to the island. Morgan’s intake assessment was more of the same and you could easily believe he had simply copied the other one, accepting without challenge what it said and not making a proper diagnosis of his own. The sole new detail here was that he had commented on the girl’s inability to speak normally and the difficulty he had understanding her. One thing, though, stood out. In order to test her literacy, and to trick her into revealing her identity, which she had so far refused to do or had been incapable of, Morgan asked her to sign her name. The girl became extremely agitated at the very suggestion and when he offered the pen to her she struck it from his hand, even though she had thitherto shown not the slightest inclination to violence. She had begun shouting, saying over and over again the same thing, ‘Sir, I cannot read. I cannot read. You will not trick me into writing my name, because I incapable.’ Morgan had underlined the last three words, obviously because of the odd use of language, and written ‘sic’ in the margin.

  I made to hand the file back to him but he waved it away. ‘No, keep it; you will need to add your notes to it. She’s your patient now. I’ll give you until the end of the year to discover for yourself how futile in practice your theories are. After that, we’ll have no more unscientific nonsense about Moral Treatment.’

  I swear his eyes twinkled as he spoke. If he was indulging me in this, I saw, it was not only for my benefit but for his own too. He drew great satisfaction, it seemed, from the prospect of my failure. As I hugged the file to my chest I thought I could have no better incentive to succeed.

  The arrangement Morgan made with me concerning Jane Dove was that I could see her whenever I wished during my spare time and at any time during the working day so long as my regular duties were fulfilled. I could also prescribe my own regime for her according to my theories, providing that it did not put too great an additional strain on staff resources.

  My responsibilities included supervising the daily exercise walk; assessing new arrivals, which I did first in conjunction with Morgan and was to do later on my own; judging when treatments including the use of restraints such as straitjackets and the chair were necessary; and overseeing hydrotherapy, as well as helping him make systematic progress reports on all patients. I was not allowed to visit the more violent inmates on the third floor until I had more experience. Morgan told me he would introduce me to them when he felt I was ready, although of course I saw them every day at exercise, walking on the rope.

  Eager though I was to get started with Jane Dove, I needed first to put in place what was necessary to follow the precepts of Moral Treatment. It would be no use introducing the patient to a new routine of kindness and close personal attention if at the same time she was still suffering under aspects of the harsh system that ruled the hospital. So I needed to isolate her from the rest of the patients.

  Fortunately I found that she already slept in a room on her own because she was a somnambulist whose nightly ramblings had disturbed the other patients in the dormitory where she’d been placed when first she arrived; consequently she now slept alone.

  Next day, while she was in the day room with the other patients, I visited her room and found to my delight that, with an adjustment here and there, and a few additions, it would serve not only as a bedroom but as a si
tting room, too. At the moment it contained a bed and a chamber pot and nothing else. I spent an hour wandering the hospital and discovered a good many rooms that were not used or at least hardly at all. From these I managed to requisition a good-sized rug, two old and battered but still serviceable armchairs and a small washstand complete with bowl, as well as a large chipped jug. In one of the unused rooms I found a couple of prints hanging on the wall, unnamed landscapes that looked as if they might be copies of English pictures, for they featured idyllic green countryside, complete with sheep. I thought them restful to a disturbed mind and had them taken up to the girl’s room along with all my other finds.

  I was in there arranging things in as pleasant a way as possible, thinking of it as a stage set and working out the most practical and pleasing place for the rug and where to position the armchairs, deciding where she would sit and where I, when I heard footsteps behind me. I looked round and found O’Reilly, the chief attendant.

  ‘And what would you be a-doing of here, sir?’ she said, her eyes sweeping the transformed room. ‘Was you thinking of moving in here yourself?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I stammered. ‘This is all for Jane Dove. Didn’t Dr Morgan inform you of our – our – little – uh – experiment?’

  ‘No sir, he did not,’ she snapped.

  ‘Well, Jane Dove is to be my guinea pig.’ O’Reilly looked baffled. ‘The subject of the experiment. It is to try a different regimen, one based on Moral Treatment.’ She looked more mystified still. ‘It’s something I’m anxious to put into practice here. The idea is to treat the patient with kindness, consideration and close attention, in general as much as possible like a normal person.’

  ‘Ah, sir, but you see, they’re not normal, are they?’ I noticed for the first time how hard her face was, the hair tugged back into a tight bun as though to punish her features. ‘They’re mad. That’s why they’re here.’ She smiled.

  ‘I know that, of course. The question is how best to treat them. So they may be cured and returned into the world.’

  ‘Cured? Let out, you say? Pardon me for saying so, sir, but I think it’s you that’s mad. Don’t you realise they are never cured? Once they’re in here, they’re here for life. It’s very rare for any of them to leave, sir. They’re beyond that.’

  I stood open-mouthed. Morgan had never told me this. He’d spoken of teaching the patients self-control, of suppressing their disruptive tendencies, of making them manageable. I had assumed this was so they could one day resume something resembling a normal life.

  I gathered my wits together and made an attempt to pretend I’d known this all along. ‘You don’t believe they can ever be cured, then?’ I said.

  ‘No, sir, I do not. And you’ll soon see, sir. Especially with this girl. She’s a quiet one, but don’t let that fool you. She’s the maddest of the lot.’ And before I could ask her to expand on this she flounced angrily from the room.

  8

  After this it was with some trepidation that in my spare time between the end of my working day and dinner that evening I ventured upon my first meeting with the girl, Jane Dove. It was essential I saw her before her bedtime, to prepare her for the transformation of her room. Otherwise, instead of helping her, the shock of entering it and finding everything altered might only confuse her more. For all I knew, she might not recognise it after the changes I had made and think she was back in her own home, wherever that was, or worse, be plunged into some fantasy in which she imagined she’d been abducted.

  I had her brought to the small office that had been allotted to me. The attendant who escorted her was quite young, perhaps only eighteen or so, and, I noticed, treated the girl gently, speaking to her softly and kindly. I guessed she was not long in the job and, being naturally sympathetic, had not had this knocked out of her yet by the rigour of the place and the poor example set by most of the other attendants. I asked her her name. ‘Eva Carlsen, sir,’ she replied. She had a slight Scandinavian accent. I guessed she must have come here with her parents from Sweden or Denmark, probably when she was quite young. I told her she should leave us and that I would call her to return the girl to the dining hall when I was finished with her.

  The subject of my experiment stood before me shivering, waif-like in spite of her height – for she was tall, easily as tall as me, and would have towered over Morgan had he been standing beside her. Her eyes flicked this way and that, assessing the room, like a cornered wild animal looking for an escape route.

  In as relaxed and kind a tone as I could manage, I said, ‘Please be seated, Jane,’ and gestured to the chair opposite me on the other side of my desk. She gingerly settled herself down, perching on the edge of the seat like a bird, ready to take off at the slightest sign of danger.

  I gave her a warm smile. She did not return it but instead ran a finger around the inside of the collar of her dress, and began to scratch the top of her back, squirming awkwardly in the chair to reach the itch. I decided to wait until this operation was finished, but when it was she began scratching at the dress around her midriff. Eventually she stopped this, too, and let her hands settle in her lap. Only when she was perfectly still did she allow herself to look at me, or rather stare into me, with those black coals of eyes. I smiled again and said, ‘Not the softest of materials, those dresses.’

  She did not return the smile but leaned forward earnestly and said softly, ‘Sir, they have calicoed my soul.’

  I opened my mouth to comment on this peculiar use of words, which naturally jarred with me, being grammatically incorrect and seeming to confirm what Morgan had told me about her speaking gibberish, but closed my lips again without saying anything, surprised. She had used the noun ‘calico’ as a verb, which was technically not possible. But was it gibberish? In a weird way it made sense. It did what language is supposed to do, conveyed something to me. And something far more meaningful than merely confirming my remark. I was taken aback. What she had actually done was imply a comment upon the whole hospital system, as represented by the rough uniform it had clothed her in. The word suggested it had chafed her inner self, just as the garment she was wearing had her body. I somehow understood all that from her odd manipulation of this one word.

  I decided this wasn’t the time to tackle her about misuse of language. So long as I was able to understand her, correctness did not matter for the present, and there was always the possibility that if I made her self-conscious about it, she would cease to speak at all.

  I shuffled some papers on the desk in front of me and pretended to study them to give myself time to think. ‘Well now, Jane …’

  ‘That is not my name.’

  ‘No, of course not, but we have to call you something. Perhaps you would prefer us to use your real name?’

  ‘Jane will do. After all, what’s in a name?’

  I wondered if this was a deliberate reference to Romeo and Juliet. It didn’t have to be, because the phrase has long since passed into daily use, to the extent of becoming a cliché. The girl could easily have come across it without ever having heard of Shakespeare.

  ‘What indeed?’ I said. ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’

  She made no reply, but stared blankly back at me, giving me no idea whether the quotation was familiar to her or not. Was that a faint glint of defiance I saw in her eyes, or was I simply ascribing to her something that wasn’t there? There was a long pause that grew more awkward for me as it went on and she showed no sign of wishing to end it. I cleared my throat again. ‘Well, then, uh, Jane, let’s try to fill in a few facts about you. Tell me, what brought you here?’

  ‘A boat, sir.’

  ‘Hah! That’s right enough. We all came here by that means. Only way to get to an island.’

  She considered this and I saw that she had not been making a joke. She had taken my question literally.

  ‘You could skate here, sir, if the winter was very cold and the water froze.’

  This was true but also completely
crazy in the context of our conversation, or rather the conversation I was trying to have. I wondered for a moment whether she was mocking me, but when I examined her features they gave nothing away. I decided not to challenge her on this but to let myself be carried along by the flow of conversation. I would not do anything that discouraged her from talking or that suggested she was ill. In this way I felt she would become more talkative and I would find out more about her.

  ‘And do you like to skate, Jane?’

  She screwed up her mouth and put her head on one side, the way a chicken will, as though she needed to think about it. I presumed she was battling with her memory, trying to grasp something half-recalled.

  ‘I think I do,’ she said at last. And then suddenly her face brightened and she said, ‘Yes, yes, I do. I am quite proficient on the ice, sir, although not so fast or elegant as … as …’ Her words disappeared into a mumble and then dried up altogether. She knitted her brows, troubled.

  ‘As who?’ I ventured gently, seeking to prompt her.

  She shook her head, like a dog just out of the river shaking off water, as if to clear her thoughts. ‘I – I unremember now. I think I used to skate around the lake on my own.’

  There it was again, another made-up word, but again one that made perfect sense.

  ‘The lake? And where was this lake, Jane? Can you tell me that?’

  She thought another minute or so and then slowly shook her head. ‘No, it was just a lake. That’s all I know. It was surrounded by woods you had to walk through to get to it. They darked and – and –’

  ‘And what?’

  She lifted her head and looked straight at me. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, sir?’

  ‘Do you?’

  She broke into a smile. ‘You won’t trick me like that. I asked you first. If I say I do and you do not, then you will think it another reason to call me mad.’

  ‘I have not called you mad at all. Do you think you’re mad?’