It was not until the afternoon exercise that I was able to see Jane Dove again. It was not the best situation for a serious discussion, especially one I knew would be unwelcome to her; we were both shivering, she in her thin dress with only a knitted shawl over it as an acknowledgement that winter had truly announced its arrival and I for my part with no coat. I had only a muffler, which Eva, who had seen my plight, had given me, and an extra undershirt, undergarments being the only items of clothing Shepherd had been abundantly equipped with.
In an effort to keep warm, we walked briskly along the footpaths the gardeners had cleared early on, a task that fully occupied them with the continuing heavy snow. After exchanging a few pleasantries with my charge, when I scarcely knew what I was saying, much less what she replied, I stopped abruptly and stood stamping my feet and clapping my arms about me in an effort to keep my blood circulating. ‘Jane, I have to talk to you about something serious,’ I said.
Her face fell. ‘What is it, sir? You are leaving this place. I knew it, I felt it coming.’
I managed a smile. ‘No, no, not that at all, although, of course, I shall have to leave one day, but not yet awhile, I hope.’
It was her turn to smile.
I plunged on. ‘But unless you can help me – help yourself, that is – then it will amount to the same thing as far as you are concerned.’ I told her about Morgan’s ultimatum.
She became very agitated, twisting the ends of her shawl round and round in her hands. ‘It impossibles, I cannot do it.’
‘I know it’s a tall order by Sunday, but you’re intelligent and quick-witted. You’ll be able to pick up enough reading to placate him.’
She looked me straight in the eye. ‘No, sir, you misunderstand. When I say it impossibles I am not talking of my capabilities, but of what is allowed. I am unpermitted to learn to read.’
‘Who says? Who forbade it? Whoever it was cares so little about you they have left you here to rot.’
Confusion took hold of her features. ‘I – I can’t remember who, sir. When I try to think of it a fog descends upon my mind. I can see nothing. I only know that if I am discovered reading, I will lose –’
‘What? What will you lose?’
She hung her head and shook it slightly and whispered so soft I could scarce hear, ‘Everything.’
I resumed walking. It was the only way I could manage to control my frustration. My face was suddenly hot in spite of the freezing weather. I was moving so quickly now she had to trot alongside me to keep up.
‘Sir,’ she said, ‘wait a minute. I have an idea.’
I stopped and resentfulled her one. ‘Well?’ I was not hopeful.
Her cheeks were red. Her panting breath turned to mist in the cold air. ‘I will pretend I can read. That will be all right.’
‘How can you pretend? How do you think you’ll be able to fool an educated man like Dr Morgan?’
She looked arch, something I had never seen in her before. ‘Oh, but sir, I am very good at pretending. And I think I know a way it may be done.’
The whole idea was so fantastical; I didn’t even bother to ask what she had in mind. Instead I sought to end the discussion by pointing out the – to me – obvious flaw in the stratagem as a whole. ‘If you pretend to read, will it not just be the same as actually being able to? If whatever relative of yours who banned it ever shows up here, they’ll be told you can read.’
‘Yes, but in that case, sir, I will not need to remain here any longer and will have no further need to please Dr Morgan. And so you will be able to reveal our ruse, that I can’t read after all, but that it was something we worked between us to save me from being put back with all those mad people when I am not mad.’
I could not help the sigh of exasperation that escaped me. The number of patients here who had told me they were the only ones who weren’t crazy! ‘And how do you propose to bring it off, eh? Tell me that?’
She smiled and I could not help noticing how fetching she looked, as flirtatious as some society women I’d known. ‘I will learn a passage from a book, get it by heart and then I will reel it off while looking at the book and appearing to read from it. Dr Morgan won’t suspect a thing, because it won’t even occur to him that someone might do that. I will learn perhaps a couple of really long passages. I have a wonderful memory, sir, you will see.’
‘Jane,’ I said. ‘You can’t remember who you are. You can’t even remember your own name.’
There was a long pause. ‘Florence,’ she said.
‘What? You’re telling me that’s your name? You knew all along?’
She looked down at her feet, avoiding my eyes. ‘It came to me just now. When you said that, about me not being able to remember it, it just jumped into my head.’
She lifted her eyes and looked straight at me, defianting me one. We stood eyeballing each other. I again had the feeling she was lying but somehow I could not bring myself to challenge her.
‘All right, Florence,’ I said. ‘This is indeed a breakthrough. When I tell Morgan, he will have to admit I’m making progress with you. It will help our cause.’
She turned away and resumed walking slowly, looking at the path upon which fresh snow had fallen even as we talked. ‘I – I would rather you said nothing to him about the name. I uncertain it is what I’m called. Perhaps it came to mind simply because it was a name I happened to like.’
I impatiented her a sigh. ‘But, don’t you see, it’s just the sort of ammunition we need.’
She stopped and gave me a look as icy as the weather. ‘If you tell anyone else, I shall deny I ever said it.’
‘Well then, on your own head be it. I can do nothing for you. You will have to embrace your fate.’ And I stalked off, furious with her. All the way back to the building I thought how stupid and ungrateful she was, after all I’d done for her, to throw away her chances of recovery because of some silly secret she felt bound to keep.
Later, though, on my own, in my room before dinner, when my heat had cooled, I began to think that perhaps she had something after all. Maybe there was a way in which we might fool Morgan. I loved the audacious duplicity of it, the cleverness of the deceit we might practise upon him, and by the time I left my room and was hurrying to Jane’s, my heart was thumping in my chest with excitement.
What surprised me was that she seemed to be expecting me. Oh, she made a good show of being humble and contrite after her earlier defiance, but I noticed she did not offer to give ground. I behaved as if nothing had happened and pretended I had not been cruel to her. ‘I’ve been thinking over what you said, about pretending to read. How did you think to work it?’
‘Well, sir, we will take this book, Great Expectations, and you will read the opening part of it to me, a little at a time. I will repeat what you say after you and we will do this until I can say it on my own without you prompting me, and then we will move on to the next little bit and so on until I have a sizeable chunk I can say from memory, enough to fool Dr Morgan.’
‘That’s good, very good. But what if he’s not convinced? What if he selects another passage for you to look at?’
‘I have thought of that possibility, too, sir. To this end, we will break the spine of the book. After my reading of the beginning, if he wants more, I will close the book and hand it back to him. When he opens it, it will naturally fall to that page.’
‘Hmm, I’m not sure I like that. What if it doesn’t?’
‘Then, sir, as I take the book from him, I will turn to the window as if to get better light and let it fall to that page while my body is blocking his view. He will never notice it’s a different page.’
I stared at her a long moment.
‘Well, sir, what do you think?’
‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you are a crafty little minx.’
‘Oh, sir,’ she said, with a nod of her head to one side, ‘I will take that as a great compliment, coming as it does from you.’
It was only later, after dinner, when I was alone and those words of hers came back to me, that I asked myself what exactly it was she had meant by them.
After that we went at it with a will, working on the opening of Great Expectations and a passage from later in the book when Pip meets Herbert Pocket in London and is instructed on the manners of a gentleman, a passage which had made her laugh when I first read it to her. We broke the back of the book in that place. She was a quick learner. We did as she’d suggested, I giving her a sentence or part of it at a time and then she sitting beside me and repeating it parrot fashion until she seemed to have it by heart.
Of course, the opening chapter of Great Expectations is one of the greatest pieces of writing in all literature, in part because it has such natural rhythm, which makes it easier to memorise than most bits of prose. But even so, she amazed me because she was so good at retaining what she had heard. She said she kept repeating the words over and over to herself when she was alone, and this was evident because I found that at the start of each new session she seemed better schooled in her pieces than when we had ended the time before. When she was ready to put all the separate sentences together and to attempt to speak the whole passage in one go, she insisted on sitting holding the book in front of her, ‘reading’ from it as she would do for Morgan. I was most impressed at the way she did this, for very cleverly she thought to run her eyes from side to side, as if they were following the lines of words on the page as she had seen me do, to give the effect that she was actually reading rather than staring at a load of meaningless symbols and parroting something learned by heart. What an actress, I told myself, to be so naturally attuned to stagecraft, to have imagined herself so wholly in the part.
It was a frantic week and we spent every moment we could on our task, with me squeezing a few minutes here, a quarter of an hour there, from my busy timetable to cloister myself with her and work away at it. I confess I felt quite exhausted from the stress of it all, whereas she seemed strangely serene, utterly confident in her ability to bring the thing off.
At last Sunday came and I prepared for the day with a sinking heart. As I dressed I couldn’t help thinking of all that was at stake. If Jane or Florence or whoever this strange girl was didn’t manage this seemingly impossible feat, then my position here might be ruined. It would be obvious to Morgan that she and I were in cahoots, that I had tried to deceive him. How then might he begin to perceive me? Might the scales fall from his eyes as he realised I was not the straightforward person he had thought me to be? Might he suspect me of falsehood in other areas too? Might he begin to wonder about my identity altogether? On that frosty morning I shivered as I thought on all this and, I tell you, it wasn’t only because of the cold.