It was a difficult morning with the letter burning a hole in my pocket. It was all I could think about. I longed to take it out and read it through again. I needed to find an answer to the problem or plan my flight; I could not simply sit and do nothing and wait for this woman to arrive.
Once or twice I was wrenched from my anxiety by Morgan speaking to me impatiently and realised he was repeating himself because I’d not heard him the first time. It was obvious he was growing frustrated with my distractedness and I had to force myself to concentrate on my tasks. But halfway through the morning he wanted to consult something in his office and while he was busy there I asked his secretary, who sat outside, when I would have to have a letter ready by if I wanted it to go next day. She said the daily boat left at nine and I would need to have it in the mailbox on the wall in the hall before eight thirty, which was when the letters were collected. I asked her some more about the postal service and worked out that provided my letter was in the box next day it would reach Ohio in time to forestall Caroline Adams’s visit.
It was in this agitated state that, after the morning round, I slipped away to see Jane Dove in her room. There was no response when I knocked on the door, so I opened it tentatively, thinking she might be asleep. Instead I found she had moved one of the armchairs so that it faced the window and was sitting watching the mist rolling off the river and across the lawns. She appeared to be in a trance and seemed not to register my presence.
I cleared my throat. She jumped and turned and stared at me. It was as if it took her a moment to swim to the surface from her immersion in her reverie.
I gave her a smile. ‘Where were you?’ I asked gently.
Her brow furrowed, like one trying to grasp something, to identify some distant memory, as if attempting to decipher what was written on the missing page of a notebook from the impression the pencil has left upon the page beneath it.
‘I – I was by a lake but I could not see the water on account of the mist. I could hear the rooks cawing.’
And indeed, as she said this, I realised I could hear that very sound from outside now. It was obvious the two things, the mist and the sound of the birds, had triggered some recollection in her, presumably of her home. Sensing this might be an opportunity to lift the curtain of her amnesia, I pulled the other armchair over and sat down facing her, our knees almost touching. She wasn’t looking at me but was once again gazing out the window, and I understood she was seeing not the hospital grounds but that other unknown place.
‘What else?’ I asked softly. ‘Can you tell me anything more about what you saw in your mind’s eye?’
She made no answer and we sat like that for a good minute until finally she shook her head and came out of her trance completely and looked straight at me, seeing me properly at last. ‘It’s gone. I can’t see it any more. I don’t know if it was real. It feels like a dream.’
I had a sudden inspiration. ‘Perhaps it was the lake upon which you skated?’
She considered this a moment. ‘Or perhaps I dreamed that too.’
We sat in silence once more and then I said, ‘What have you been doing with yourself all morning? Are you not bored?’
‘It is better than day-rooming it with the others.’
‘You prefer being alone?’
She smiled. ‘I prefer armchairing to benching.’
There it was again, that strange use of English, that verbing of nouns, but once again it made perfect sense. It communicated, which is surely all words are meant to do.
‘I think it is not good for you to have nothing to do,’ I said. ‘My feeling is you are more likely to recover your past by some stimulus that reminds you of it, as the mist and the rooks did just now. But sitting here struggling to do so strikes me as not being the best way to do it. You need more ideas put into your mind to provoke recollection.’
She looked at me blankly.
‘I’ve decided I will teach you to read.’
Immediately she shrank back into her chair, clasping its arms so tightly with her hands that her knuckles showed white. Her expression was one of horror. ‘Oh, no, no, sir. Not that. I have alreadied you about that. It is strictly unallowed.’
‘Who unallowed it? Who?’
Her grip loosened as she thought about this. She bit her lip and finally shook her head. ‘I unremember that. I only know it is.’
I pondered this a little. She seemed so terrified by the very thought of learning to read I decided it would serve no purpose to push the matter. ‘Very well, we’ll leave that for now. I will say only one thing. Books and reading are good for the human mind. They are the very bedrock upon which all education is founded. They are the fount of culture. Whoever has told you otherwise, whoever has forbidden you these benefits, cannot be a good person. Think it over; you may come to change your mind.’
Her expression did not alter and we sat again without speaking, until at last, ever conscious of the time as I had become under the regime of Morgan’s constant clock-watching, I rose and said, ‘I have asked Eva to visit you for half an hour of her spare time. She will bring some needlework to keep you occupied.’
Her face relaxed. ‘I unremember if that is something I can do but I have a strong feeling it is not.’
‘In that case Eva will instruct you. It is part of the Moral Treatment to keep you occupied. It does not do for the mind to dwell on things.’
She made no reply but turned her head and looked out the window again, exactly as she had been doing when I came in. ‘I will see you again soon,’ I said, pushing back my chair and getting to my feet. She did not respond and I found that when I went out I instinctively closed the door quietly behind me so as not to disturb her meditation again.
For the rest of the day I was preoccupied with the letter from Caroline Adams, so much so that during the exercise hour I hardly spoke to Jane Dove. She in turn seemed to be lost in her own thoughts. It was only when the bell rang to signal that the session was over and we were turning back toward the building that she broke the silence. I realised it was the first time she had ever initiated a conversation between us.
‘I was thinking …’ she began, then stopped and licked her lips nervously.
‘Yes …?’ This was said gently. She had never so far ventured to tell me any of her thoughts and I did not want to pressure her, which instinct told me would only make her clam up. I continued walking beside her, looking down at the ground, as if what she had to say was of no consequence at all to me, unless she wished it to be.
She cleared her throat. ‘I was thinking about what you said concerning reading.’ She paused and I simply nodded to encourage her to continue. ‘As I have told you, it is unpermissioned. But looking at books is not.’
I was, I admit, slow to follow and my response was crass. ‘But there’s not much point if you can’t read.’
She stopped and turned and looked me boldly in the face. ‘But some books have pictures in them, do they not? I think I would like to study the pictures.’
This was an interesting development and no mistake. ‘Very well, we will go now to the library and see what we can find.’
On the way I tried to make up for my earlier ignoring of her by engaging her in conversation, even though all I seemed capable of was the most pathetic kind of small talk. After all, what does one say to a lunatic one hardly knows? I asked her how she found her room and whether she was enjoying the better food now, to both of which she replied enthusiastically and gratefully, although I could tell only half her mind was on what she was saying. I saw she was eager to get to the library.
Once there, I indicated the bookshelves with a sweep of my arm and told the girl to help herself. I said I, too, would look for books with prints or colour plates in them. I began at the shelves where the non-fiction books were ranged – but not the medical, which I did not feel at all suitable for a young woman or likely to be beneficial to anyone with a mental affliction. After flicking through a few volumes, I came across a book of Audubon’s pictures of birds in gorgeous colour plates and quite lost myself in admiring the vividness of the hues, the reds and yellows of exotic parrots and the lifelike rendering of the creatures, and so failed to pay attention to what the girl was up to. I suppose this was because I was not a trained medical man; I had not learned to put the patient first. Thinking about it, I do not know whether as a human being I ever learned to put another person before myself.
Eventually, though, I looked up from the bird book, eager to show it to her, since I was excited to find something that so exactly answered our purpose, a book full of beautiful and colourful images that would give her great pleasure to sit and study. To my surprise, I saw the girl was over at the shelves containing fiction, staring into an open book she had in her hands.
‘I doubt you’ll find much there,’ I called across to her.
She looked over her shoulder at me. ‘On the contrary, sir, I have goldstruck. There are many books here I should like.’
I closed the Audubon and, still holding it, walked over to her. She held out the book she was looking at and I saw there was a black and white print on the page. I put the Audubon under my arm and took the other book from her. The picture showed a little girl sitting on a beach, and behind her an inverted boat with a chimney emitting smoke poking up from what had once been the hull and was now the roof. I recognised it immediately as the Peggotty house from David Copperfield in the original Phiz illustration.
‘Yes, that’s something.’ I flicked through the rest of the volume. ‘But there aren’t many pictures, considering it’s such a long book.’
‘There are enough for me,’ she replied. ‘And the length of the book unconsequences; I will not be looking at the other pages.’
I closed the Dickens and swapped it for the Audubon, which I opened, flicking through the pages, revealing a cascade of colour. ‘Would you not prefer this? The whole book is made up of pictures; there is more for you to look at.’
She eyed the book suspiciously. ‘I think I would rather the other one.’
‘Are you sure? Why would you not like this?’
‘Does it contain a picture of a rook?’
I consulted the index, found that it did and turned to the appropriate page. I held it out to her.
She turned her head away. ‘In that case, I should unlike it. I unlike rooks. I would unlike to sit in my room and look at a picture of one.’
I became exasperated. ‘But that’s craz—’ I began and then realised that this sort of oddness was only to be expected; the girl was here, after all, because she was mad. ‘Forgive me. The point I’m trying to make is that just because there’s a picture of a rook in the book, it doesn’t mean you have to look at it.’
‘Ah, but, sir, I would know it was there.’
I sighed. ‘Very well.’ I swapped the books over again. ‘But what is the use of this other book that has pictures to illustrate a story, one you cannot follow without reading it?’
‘I may not be able to read it but I can sit and look at them and make up my own stories. I can look at the picture of that funny upside-down boat and try to imagine the kind of people who live in it. It will while away many an hour for me, up there, alone in my room.’
I wondered for a moment whether this would be good for her, sitting and making things up, fashioning for herself a fantasy world to retreat into, when surely what I should be doing was getting her to engage with real life. But when I saw her looking at me with such an eager expression, eyes shining bright, cheeks flushed with excitement, the pulse beating in that lovely long white neck, I hadn’t the heart to refuse. Besides, I had spent my whole life taking people into worlds of make-believe for a few hours here and there and who was I to argue it might be bad for them? Didn’t we all need to escape the harsh realities of the world sometimes, and didn’t this poor girl more than most?
I smiled. ‘All right, you can have that one.’
She laid her fingers on the back of my hand, the one that held the book and said, ‘Oh thank you, thank you, sir. I cannot tell you how I grateful you.’
We stood like that, her hand upon mine, like a butterfly that had landed there, saying nothing, until of a sudden it became awkward and, at the same instant, we both snatched our hands away.