The Girl Who Couldn't Read

by John Harding

  The following morning it stopped snowing and the sun shone brightly in a clear frosty sky. Jane and I set off together for the pond, with her animated and chatting away in her strange language and giggling like a schoolgirl. Today we seemed more like child and favourite uncle than doctor and patient, or the lover and his lass we had sometimes felt close to being.

  Eva’s boys must have been out early, since the pond had been cleared of snow. I shivered when I saw how close it was to where I had dumped the unfortunate Miss Adams, who lay only twenty or thirty yards away from the edge of the ice. But when I saw there was no sign of the body and how effectively it was concealed, I began to enjoy the idea of its proximity. While Jane sat by the edge of the frozen water putting on the skates Eva had lent her, I strolled casually round the pond until I came to the spot where I reckoned Miss Adams lay. I crunched through the snow and then stood watching my charge, and could not prevent a little smile at the idea I was standing on my victim and that I was the only one who knew.

  Jane Dove had evidently skated a great deal before; she was certainly no novice. She glided effortlessly across the ice, graceful as a swan, head held high by that deliciously long neck. She criss-crossed the surface, going perilously close to the edges – which was unavoidable because the pond was so small, not at all like the lake she had told me about – but always seeming to know where she was. She swept around the little circle of the pond’s perimeter with a confidence that belied her normal shy self. And then, all at once, she stopped skating and let herself slow to a halt, coming to rest at more or less the dead centre of the ice. She stood there on her skates, staring ahead of her, hair blowing in the breeze, looking wild and completely crazy. I did not know what had happened but I had a hollow feeling in my chest. Something from deep inside her seemed to have tipped her over the edge.

  I stumbled through the snow to the edge of the pond and called out, ‘Jane! Jane! What’s the matter?’

  Her features were as immobile as her body; she showed no sign of having heard me. Then I had a sudden inspiration, ‘Florence!’ I shouted. ‘Florence!’

  Immediately her head swung round and she looked straight at me and, as she did so, began to wobble. Her feet slid in opposite directions and she collapsed in a heap.

  It was difficult for me to reach her quickly. My shoes slipped and slid on the ice and a couple of times I nearly fell flat on my back. She remained sitting on the ice, staring at me as if at a stranger. ‘It’s all right, Florence, I’m coming,’ I yelled. She didn’t seem to care.

  Eventually I was with her. I got behind her, put my hands under her arms and hauled her to her feet. There was a moment when her skates began to slide away beneath her and I thought we were both going to go over, but I managed to stay steady and got her safely upright.

  ‘What’s the matter? What happened?’ I said.

  She regarded me as though she had no idea who I was, then said a single word: ‘Theo.’

  I waited a moment but nothing else came, so I said, ‘Who is Theo? Is he someone you used to skate with?’

  Her eyes were staring at me but I felt they were seeing nothing. It was as though the mechanism inside them was focused inwards, looking at something long buried there. She nodded slowly. ‘Yes. He was tall.’

  Again she offered nothing more and so I tried another prompt. ‘Is he perhaps the brother you mentioned before? Is Theo your brother?’

  Her brow furrowed, as though she was thinking hard. At last she said, ‘My brother? Yes, I think he might have been. He was tall like me. Yes, he must have been my brother.’

  It struck me as odd that while I had spoken of this Theo in the present tense, she had used the past. Was this because something had happened to him or was it that she was looking at her former life as something long gone? I could not tell.

  With my arm around her shoulders I began to walk her slowly toward the edge of the ice. She made no attempt to skate but clip-clopped clumsily along on her blades. When we made the shore and she was sitting taking off the skates I said, ‘All right then, tell me more about Theo.’

  Again she stared into some far distant past for what seemed like an age and then at last she looked at me and gave a second take, as though she had just realised I was there. ‘I – I can’t. I had a picture of a boy skating on a lake, but now it’s gone. He’s not there any more.’

  ‘Try,’ I urged her. ‘Come, Florence, you must try.’

  She stood up and looked me in the eye, fully engaged now, and said, ‘You must not call me that, sir. I am not that person any more. Here I am Jane Dove.’ And with that she stalked off back toward the building. I staggered through the snow after her and caught her up, but despite all my fractured attempts at conversation she said nothing further all the way.

  It was when we were approaching the building that a sudden movement in an upper window caught my eye. I saw what I thought was the figure of a woman dressed in black looking down at us, but at that moment I caught my foot against something, a branch buried beneath the snow perhaps, and stumbled, and when I had righted myself and looked up again, the woman, if she had ever existed, was gone.

  22

  It might have been my fevered imagination, of course, all my dark anxieties, the constant fear of discovery and exposure that someone like me has to live with, but this occurrence of the woman in the window began to play upon my mind, because it seemed to confirm a feeling I had had lately of being watched. At odd times I sensed the weight of another’s eyes upon me, although whenever I looked about me there was never anybody there.

  The only person it might be was O’Reilly. Whenever I was in her presence, perhaps in the day room or else in the patients’ dining hall, and I happened to glance at her, I would find her watching me intently, which suggested to me that it was she who was spying on me at other times, when she was concealed from my view.

  I had made an enemy of her, of that much I was sure. I could think of no justification for her dislike, except for the business with Jane Dove, which she seemed to take as a challenge to her authority, as indeed it was, for if successful it would threaten the continuance of the harsh discipline she exercised upon the hospital and which I knew she enjoyed. Moreover, I feared she had found my draft letter to Caroline Adams and suspected that I was not who I claimed to be. If that were true, I wondered what kind of game she was playing and why she did not expose me immediately. Perhaps she thought I might be useful to her in some way, and even though she might not have worked out yet what that might be, it was worth having me in her pocket. Or maybe she simply liked having another being within her power. This was less logical, perhaps, but I had seen the savage pleasure she took in her cruelty to the patients. Although I have never been sadistic, I, of all people, understood well enough the Godlike thrill of dictating the fate of another person.

  I decided I must not let myself be discouraged by the incident of being imprisoned in the storeroom; I must renew my campaign to gain some advantage over her and so neutralise the hold she had over me. She presented a serious risk to my hopes of getting clean away. I could not manage that if I were under constant surveillance. I made up my mind to find out what lay behind the business of her sneaking off to the third floor.

  Following her had gotten me nowhere – or rather it had led to me being locked in a room – she was much too sharp. I would have to explore the third floor some time when she was out of the way. Therein lay the difficulty, for the woman did not appear to take a moment off. Whenever you looked around she seemed to be there, often materialising as if from nowhere like a malign ghost. Or I would go to some room in the building, perhaps an unplanned and unannounced visit, and lo and behold, when I arrived, she would already be there, as if waiting for me.

  But there was one situation when she was absent from the island altogether for a whole night at a time. This was when an unmanageable inmate had to be sent back to the asylum on the mainland, where they had better facilities for the restraint of violent patients. O’Reilly wa
s the one entrusted with the duty of escorting such women there. She would take another attendant with her and they would convey the patient, who was usually straitjacketed or sedated or both, to the shore on the morning boat that brought us new patients and supplies. Because there was no boat back to the island the same day, they would spend the night ashore and return on the next morning’s boat.

  At such times O’Reilly would be gone for almost twenty-four hours. The trouble was these instances were few and far between and I might have a long wait until the next one. It had happened only once in all the time I had been there.

  I had been mulling this over when, as luck would have it, an incident occurred that necessitated the removal of a patient. It was on account of the weather. Snow had been falling heavily for a whole day and night and it was impossible for the gardeners to keep the footpaths outside clear for the patients to exercise. Without their daily walk the inmates grew restless and increasingly fractious. There were numerous aggravations at mealtimes especially, with women fighting more fiercely than usual over food, and tin plates had been thrown or used as weapons. The attendants were kept busy, rushing this way and that, trying to quell each little outburst before it transformed itself into something more serious. But they were truly up against it, because the more disturbance there was, the greater the agitation of the whole population. And at the evening meal one night things boiled over and one patient, a grossly built woman who could only have maintained such a weight on the deprived diet offered in the hospital by regularly robbing her fellows of their food, stole a piece of bread from the woman next to her, who retaliated by picking up her fork and stabbing the bully in the eye. All hell was let loose, with the half-blinded woman roaring like a wounded lion, scattering those around her in fear. She seized her enemy and threw her across the table, sending plates and food flying everywhere, and then tried to strangle her, although not very effectively, for she had not the knack.

  It took half an hour to subdue her and get everyone else calmed down, with O’Reilly marching up and down the room dispensing blows upon the backs of the rioting patients with a stick. Of course, this only exacerbated the tension and things went from bad to worse.

  As it was my duty in the dining hall that day, I decided to take charge. I went up behind O’Reilly and caught hold of the stick as she lifted up her arm to strike another patient. Before she knew what was happening, I pulled it from her grasp and broke it across my knee. She turned and glared at me, eyes burning with hatred. I ignored her and said to one of the other attendants, ‘Quickly, go to the kitchen and tell them to bring more food – everything they can lay their hands on, and fast.’

  Moments later cooks and kitchen maids came hurrying in with baskets of bread, plates of cold meat and even a great basket of apples, a rare sight in the hospital. They began distributing it at random, throwing it onto the tables. Straight away the half-starved women stopped fighting and began scrabbling around for food. Naturally this occasioned more scraps between them, but there was so much food they soon realised they had no need to fight for it and indeed were actually losing out by doing so. The place quieted down as they mostly became too busy eating to cause trouble. As the mayhem subsided, the attendants gradually guided them back to their seats and a semblance of order was restored. After a momentous struggle with four attendants, the big woman who had started it all was straitjacketed. The woman who had stabbed her was now sitting on the floor sobbing, evidently horrified by what she had begun, but nevertheless she was pulled to her feet and taken off to the violent patients’ ward on the third floor. Her abject demeanour made this seem utterly unnecessary now, but the rationale in the hospital was, quite reasonably perhaps, that once a patient had shown herself capable of extreme violence, she could not be trusted not to repeat the action.

  The other woman’s injured eye was in such a state that after Morgan had examined it he said he could do nothing for her and that she would have to go to the hospital on the mainland, which meant O’Reilly would have to take her.

  The following morning, I stood at the window of my room and watched as the trio of O’Reilly, her assistant and the wounded woman, still in a straitjacket with a patch over her injured eye, set off for the landing stage. Just as they reached the front entrance to the hospital grounds, O’Reilly paused and turned her head and looked straight up at me, as if she felt my eyes upon her. It sent a chill through me, the fact she knew I was there, but I made no attempt to hide and stared resolutely back at her. I imagined she was regretting leaving me free to roam her domain at will.

  I would need a safe amount of time to explore the third floor, a good hour when I was sure Morgan would not catch me there, and I spent much of the night working in my room to achieve this. After our morning therapies had been completed and several hapless women half frozen in icy water or bound screaming to chairs, I handed him a huge pile of patient reports to check. Normally I gave him a few at a time, as and when I’d got round to them, and in this I was more or less up to date. Overnight, though, I had filled out dozens of them, many of my entries completely fictitious because I hadn’t re-examined the patients concerned since my last reports, but Morgan had no way of knowing that, especially with O’Reilly out of the way. Moreover, in many of the reports I made observations and asked questions which I knew would be more time-consuming to answer than the queries themselves had been to frame. I reckoned a couple of hours was the minimum it would take him. Lastly, after my time at the hospital I was beginning to know something of psychology, at least so far as this one person, Morgan, was concerned. I figured the doctor, with his passion for punctuality and his obsession with efficiency, would not be able to leave the pile of reports alone until he had worked through them all.

  It was inevitable – it inevitabled – that he questioned the quantity of work I handed him in one go and I apologised and said I’d got behind with the reports and had made a great effort to get back up to date, emphasising how I understood the paramount importance of that. Morgan castigated me for my dilatoriness, as I had known he would, and said he would set to work on them after supper that evening, which was exactly as I’d hoped; the patients would be settled down and few of the attendants would be about. The corridors would most likely be empty and I would be able to move around without arousing suspicion or encountering any hindrance.

  23

  Everything was as quiet as death when I slipped from my room that evening. I had that wonderful feeling that surges through the blood sometimes, the sense that I was all-powerful and that nothing and no one would be able to withstand me. O’Reilly was out of the way, exiled across the water, and Morgan weighed down by all the paperwork I had visited upon him. Everything was on my side. Not once did I put my foot upon a creaky floorboard, not once did I collide with a piece of furniture or trip or stumble in the shadows. I had only a candle to light my way, and its flickering flame threw dancing shadows upon the walls, but neither these nor anything else unnerved me.

  I went downstairs, and paused outside Morgan’s office with my ear to the door. The satisfying scratch of pen upon paper told me he was hard at work. I made my way to the back staircase and stood at the foot of it for a good minute, listening. I did not want to run into someone coming down it on my way up; it would be tricky trying to explain what business I had to be there.

  There was no noise, only the soft sound of my own breath and, from somewhere outside, the lonely cry of an owl, that ghostly predator of the night. Funny, though, how it made me shiver. I had a sudden vision of poor Caroline Adams, lying out there in her icy shroud. I shuddered at the thought of it and made a silent wish that she sleep soundly. I swore, as I had when luck freed me from the train, that I would bury the part of my nature that drove me to do such things. I reassured myself that I had not broken that vow. The removal of Miss Adams had been an absolute necessity for my safety, and not the result of any evil impulse. Satisfied now that no one was about, I climbed the stairs to the third floor.

  I fo
und myself in a long corridor with doors either side. In the distance I could hear muttered voices and I followed the sound. I came to a door that was slightly ajar. I was bold as brass now and not ready to retreat. I put my eye to the crack between door and doorjamb and saw inside two attendants sitting in chairs either side of a table. The table was against the wall, which both were leaning against, looking relaxed. There was a bottle of whiskey on the table between them and each had a glass. They were conversing quietly. I retreated, soft as a rat, and tried the doors in the corridor and found them locked. Listening at them, I could hear the sounds of breathing, snoring and people tossing and turning in bed, and the occasional woman muttering in her sleep. These then were the rooms where the difficult patients slept, many of them in isolation because of their unpredictable and possibly violent natures. There was no way of knowing if my madwoman was in one of these rooms, or any way of getting into it if she was. I crept back along the corridor toward the stairs, about to descend, my mission a dismal failure and the mystery of the missing woman still unsolved, when I heard the creak of a floorboard above my head. Looking carefully to the other side of the staircase, I realised another flight continued up, rather more steeply, and it dawned upon me that it must lead to an attic above.

  I was standing there contemplating whether to climb up and investigate further, or get out of there fast while my luck still held, when there came the most hellish sound I had ever heard, a manic laughter, twisted from the merriment and jocularity we associate with that sound into something so awful, so redolent of perversion and murderous intent, that I nearly dropped the candle. Behind me the murmurs of the attendants’ voices ceased. I heard a chair being pushed back and a voice say, ‘It sounds as if she’s getting restless up there. It gets on my nerves, so it does. I’ve a good mind to go up there and give her what for, and indeed I would, but I don’t have the key.’