Читать книгу The Girl Who Couldn’t Read - John Harding - Страница 9

After our visit to the hydrotherapy room, Morgan took me on a brief tour of the institution. We began on the second floor, where the dormitories were arranged along a long corridor that must have run a good deal of the length of the building. Most of the women slept in large rooms accommodating twenty or so beds, although some were in smaller rooms, and a few were in isolation.

‘It may be that they are violent or that there is something about them, some habit or tic that is a nuisance to others that makes them a victim of violence, or simply that they continually make a racket and keep everyone else awake,’ Morgan explained. ‘We try to keep things as peaceful as possible.’

Each sleeping area had a room nearby where two attendants alternately slept and kept watch. ‘Is this to prevent the patients escaping?’ I asked.

‘Escaping? Escaping?’ He looked askance at me. ‘Good God, man, they cannot escape, because in order to do so they would first have to be prisoners. They are not; they are patients. They do not escape; they abscond. Or would do if we were to let them. Anyway, the sleeping quarters are locked at night so they cannot wander.’

I surveyed the length of the corridor and the many doors. ‘What about the risk of fire? Surely if one broke out, there would not be time to unlock all these doors?’

He sighed. ‘You may well be right. I have my doubts about some of the women we are forced to employ and fear that in such a case they would think only of saving themselves rather than chance their own lives getting the patients out.’

‘I’ve seen a system where the doors in a corridor are linked and locked by a device at the end of the row that secures or releases them all at once.’

He stopped and stared at me. ‘I know of only one institution that has such a system. Sing Sing prison. How came you to see it?’

I could only hope he didn’t notice my momentary hesitation before replying. ‘I didn’t mean I’d actually seen it, sir. I meant that I had seen there is such a system. I think I read about it in the Clarion or some other newspaper.’

He resumed walking. ‘I’m sure we cannot afford such luxuries. The state will fund these things for lawbreakers, but not, alas, for lunatics.’

I could not help clenching my fists at the idea that prevention from being burned to death in a locked room should be considered a luxury, but said nothing. I was not here, after all, to take up the cause of the lunatics.

On the ground floor we visited a long bleak room with bare wooden benches around the walls, bolted to them, all occupied by inmates, and in the centre a table covered by a shining white cloth, around which sat half a dozen attendants. The entire room was as spotless as the tablecloth and I thought what a good job the attendants must do to keep it so clean. I would later mock my own stupidity for this assumption. At either end of the table were two potbelly stoves, whose heat I could only feel from a few feet away when we approached them, but even if my own experience hadn’t told me they were inadequate to the task of heating such a large room, I would have known because the women on the benches were shivering and hugging themselves for warmth. The backs of the benches were perfectly straight and you could tell they were uncomfortable from the way the inmates were forced to sit upright upon them, the seats being so narrow the sitter would simply slide off if she slouched. Each bench looked as if it would accommodate five people, which I could tell from the fact that every one had six women sitting on it and looked unpleasantly crowded. These inmates were all clad in the same coarse, drab calico garment I had seen on the woman in the hydrotherapy room. On one side of the room were three barred windows set at more than five feet from the ground, so that even standing, let alone sitting, it was impossible for any but an exceptionally tall woman to see out of them.

When I mentioned this to Morgan, thinking, but not saying, that it was a poor piece of design, he said, ‘That’s the idea. We do not want them looking out – it would be a distraction.’

I had to bite my tongue not to ask distraction from what, since the women had absolutely nothing to occupy them. There was no sound from any of them and they all seemed subdued, staring blankly into space, or down at the floor or even sitting with their eyes closed and possibly dozing, until they became aware of us, whereupon I sensed a ripple of excitement pass around the room.

A woman stood up and approached Morgan. She stretched out a hand and tugged his sleeve. ‘Doctor, doctor, have you come to sign my release?’ she said. She was old, perhaps sixty or so, with a bent back and a brown wizened walnut of a face.

Carefully, he lifted her hand from his arm as if it had been some delicate inanimate object and let it drop gently by her side. ‘Not today, Sarah, not today,’ he told her. ‘Now be a good girl and sit down, for you know we have to see you can behave properly before there can be any talk of release.’

I was impressed he knew her by name – he’d told me there were some four hundred patients in the hospital – which made him smile. ‘She’s been here thirty years, since long before my time. She asks me the same thing on every occasion she sets eyes on me; she does not realise she will never go home.’

While this had been going on, other patients had taken their lead from Sarah and risen from their seats and a great hubbub of chatter had sprung up. In response to this disturbance the attendants rose from the table and busied themselves taking hold of those who were walking about and leading them back to the benches and where necessary pushing them down onto them. ‘Now behave!’ I heard one attendant snap at a young woman. ‘Or you’ll be for it later.’ Instantly the woman turned pale and meekly went back to her place.

Eventually all the patients were seated again and after a few more stern words from the attendants, the chatter died down and silence reigned once more. Some still looked at us, with what seemed like great interest, but most resumed their earlier pose, and simply sat and stared empty-eyed straight ahead, not even making eye contact with the women sitting opposite them on the other side of the room.

‘What are they doing here?’ I whispered to Morgan.

‘Doing? Doing? Why, man, you see for yourself, they are not doing anything. This is the day room, where they spend much of the day. They will sit like this until it is time for their evening meal.’

‘When do they have that?’

‘At six o’clock.’

It was presently only four o’clock. I could not help thinking that if I were made to sit in total silence with nothing at all to occupy me, even if I were not off my head to begin with, I soon would be.

Morgan looked at me angrily, and I wondered for a moment whether I’d actually spoken my thoughts aloud, but being sure I hadn’t, I saw I had irritated him by the tone of my questions. He took my queries as criticism of the regime, which, I began to see, they were, since I was so appalled by what I was seeing that I could not prevent a certain disbelief creeping into my tone.

‘It is, as I said,’ he paused to let go a sigh of exasperation, ‘a question of management. If they were all doing something, they would be more difficult to manage. Any activity would have to involve something to do it with. If you allowed them books, for example, some of them would damage the books, or they would throw them at the attendants, or use them as weapons against their neighbours. And even if they simply read them it would not be good, for it would give them ideas. They have too many ideas already. It would be the same with sewing or knitting. Can you imagine the possible consequences of handing them needles? So removing potentially dangerous objects and maintaining an air of calm is essential for control. But also it is therapeutic. They acquire through practice the ability to sit and do nothing. It teaches them to be calm. If they can do this, then both their lives and ours are made easier.’

After this he took me outside via a rear entrance to show me the grounds. There were extensive lawns and an ornamental pond and beyond this some woodland. I felt a great relief to be out in the open air. I looked back at the hospital. It was a forbidding sight and I could not help thinking how daunting the first approach to it must be for a new patient. The style was gothic, with a fake medieval tower at one end and a round turret at the other. Much of it was strangled by ivy. The windows were small, which accounted for the gloom within, many of them merely narrow openings to imitate the arrow slits of an ancient castle.

Once again Morgan must have read my thoughts. ‘Dismal-looking edifice, isn’t it?’

I turned away from it. ‘I fear no one could say otherwise. It looks as if it ought to be haunted.’

He began to walk away and I heard him mutter something that sounded like, ‘Oh it is, my boy, believe me, it is.’ I had the sense that he was talking to himself and did not think I could hear him.

I caught up with him just as we came upon a group of lunatics out for their daily walk. Still clad in their same worn calico dresses, each woman now had a woollen shawl and, bizarrely, a straw hat, such as you might wear on a day out on Coney Island, making the overall impression strangely comic. The women were lined up in twos, guarded by attendants.

As they passed us, a shiver of horror crept through me. My gaze was met with vacant eyes and inexpressive faces, while many of them jabbered away, seemingly holding conversations with themselves, or sometimes leaning toward their partners and talking animatedly, although in most cases the other woman appeared not to be listening, either staring mutely ahead or muttering away herself, lost in a conversation of her own. I saw too that these women were under restraint. Wide leather belts were locked around their waists and attached to a long cable rope, so that they were all linked to one another, a sight that reminded me of old illustrations I had seen of slaves being led from their African villages to the slavers’ ships. I did a rough count and estimated there must have been around twenty women roped together in this fashion.

We stood aside to let them pass and I could see many of them had dirty noses, unkempt hair and grimy skin. My own nostrils attested that they were not clean, whereas I hadn’t noticed any unpleasant smells amongst the other women in the day room and was surprised that there should be any now we were in the fresh air.

‘Who are these women?’ I asked Morgan.

‘They’re the most violent on the island,’ he replied. ‘They are kept on the third floor, separate from the rest. They are all extremely disturbed and their presence would not be compatible with the treatment of the others.’

As if to verify this, one of them began to yell, which sparked off a reaction in another, who commenced to sing, in a strangely beautiful and haunting voice, the old song ‘Barbara Allen’, and for a moment it felt as if the sadness of the song was a reflection of her state, but then others broke out in a discordant caterwauling, raucous stuff such as you hear in low taverns, and one woman added to the cacophony by mumbling prayers, while others stuck to simple cursing, casting oaths defiantly into the air seemingly at nothing or no one in particular, but to the world in general and what it had done to them.

The women were forced to keep to the footpaths and I thought how they must have longed to kick off their shoes and run barefoot across the soft, elegantly coiffed grass. Every so often one of them would bend and pick up something, a leaf or nut or fallen twig, but immediately an attendant would be upon her and force her to discard it.

‘They are not allowed possessions,’ Morgan observed to me.

Possessions! What kind of hell was this where a fallen leaf was counted a possession? I could not help but be reminded of Lear, in which I had once played Edmund – who else? – and the old king’s speech: ‘Oh, reason not the need, our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous.’

Following in the wake of this miserable spectacle of humanity, we passed a small pavilion, no doubt a vestige from the days when the asylum had been a private residence. On the wall was painted in elegant script ‘While I live, I hope.’ I shook my head at the irony of this; you only had to look at these poor women shuffling along to see there was no truth in it.

We wandered the grounds for the best part of an hour, during which I had several uncomfortable moments, as every now and then Morgan attempted to quiz me on my ideas for the treatment of lunatics, while at the same time ridiculing them without managing to convey any clue as to what these ideas actually were. I began to feel quite aggrieved that he should patronise me so and frustrated that I could not produce any counter-argument, and sensed myself losing control, which of course would have ruined everything. I held my tongue only with the greatest difficulty.

Morgan pulled out his watch. ‘Dinner in six minutes. You may as well observe the dining hall.’

Back inside the hospital we looked on as the more violent inmates, still in twos, were marched through a doorway in shambling parody of a military manoeuvre. They were taken off to a separate dining room, Morgan told me, for they needed careful supervision while they ate. After they had gone, I followed him into the long, narrow dining hall where the rest of the patients were standing, behind backless benches on either side of plain deal tables that ran almost the entire length of the hall’s centre. At a word from one of the attendants the inmates began to scramble over the benches and take their places upon them in such a disorderly fashion I couldn’t help thinking of pigs at the trough.

All along the tables were bowls filled with a dirty-looking liquid that Morgan assured me was tea. By each was a piece of bread, cut thick and buttered. Beside that was a small saucer that, as I peered more closely, proved to contain prunes. I counted five on each, no more no less. As I watched, one woman grabbed several saucers, one after the other, and emptied the prunes into her own. Then, holding tight to her own bowl of tea, she stole that of the woman next to her and gulped it down.

Morgan watched and, when I glanced at him, lifted his eyebrow and said, ‘Survival of the fittest,’ and smiled.

Looking around the tables, I saw women snatching other people’s bread and others left with nothing at all. All this Morgan viewed with such complete indifference that I began to despair of humanity, until I noticed one inmate, a young woman, not much more than a girl really, with long dark hair that fell down over her face, half veiling it, tear her own slice of bread in two and pass one portion to the woman next to her, who had been robbed of her own and who accepted it eagerly, showing her gratitude with a smile, the first I had seen in this place. At this moment, as if feeling the weight of my eyes upon her, the girl who had given away her own bread lifted her head and stared straight at me with a look that chilled me to the bone. It had a knowingness in it, as if she saw right through me and recognised what I was and observed something in me that enabled her to claim kinship. I was only able to hold her gaze for a short time before I had to look away. A minute or so later, I glanced back at her and, finding her eyes still fastened upon me, had to turn away and walk to the other end of the room.

While all this scramble for food was going on, attendants prowled up and down behind the women, not bothering to stop the petty larcenies, but tossing an extra slice of bread here and there when they saw someone going without.

When the bread and prunes had been consumed, which in truth didn’t take long, for there was not much of it and the women were obviously ravenous, the attendants fetched large metal cans from which they dispensed onto each of the women’s now empty plates a small lump of grey meat, fatty and unappetising, and a single boiled potato. You’d have thought a dog would have baulked at it, and indeed I don’t think I ever saw a dog so poorly fed, but the women fell upon it as if it was the most sumptuous feast. A few, I noticed, grimaced as they bit into the meat, showing it to be as rancid as it looked, but managed to swallow it nonetheless. Everyone else devoured it as fast as they could chew it – and it was evidently so tough, this was no easy thing – and, when it and the potato were done, looked balefully at their plates as though they could not believe the meagre offering was already gone.

Afterwards Morgan and I had our dinner in the doctors’ dining room. Although the dining table would have accommodated six people, there were only the two of us. I asked how many other physicians there were, at which Morgan shrugged. ‘We do not have unlimited resources, you know. The state does not set great store on treating the mentally ill. We cannot afford to employ more staff or anyone more experienced than you. Which is fortunate for you. Normally someone just starting out upon a career as a psychiatric doctor might wait years for an opportunity such as you have here.’

‘Indeed, I am very grateful for it, sir,’ I said, deciding some humble pie as an appetiser would not go amiss.

‘Especially with your old-fashioned ideas,’ added Morgan.

Fortunately I was not called upon to explain them as just then our food was brought in, which quite captured Morgan’s attention. There was a decent grilled sole to start, followed by a very acceptable steak and a variety of cooked vegetables. It was more than passable. I’d eaten worse in many hotels and it was certainly much better than the fare I’d had recently. The bottle of wine we shared was a luxury I hadn’t tasted for a considerable time.

Afterwards there was an excellent steamed treacle pudding, followed by a selection of cheeses. When we had finished and rose from the table I took advantage of Morgan consulting his watch, which he seemed to do every few minutes, to slip the sharp cheese knife up my sleeve.

‘Well, then,’ said Morgan, ‘you will no doubt be tired after all your travelling, not to mention your encounter with public transport, and I have some correspondence to attend to, so I will say goodnight.’ To my horror, he stretched out his hand for me to shake, which of course I could not do because I had the knife up my right sleeve with its handle cupped in the palm of my hand. There was an awkward moment when I did not respond and his hand was suspended in a kind of limbo between us.

He cleared his throat and, as smoothly as a trained actor overcoming a colleague’s missing of a cue, turned the thwarted handshake into a gesture toward the door, as though that had been what he had intended to do all along, and we proceeded to it, where he paused and said, ‘Oh, there’s a small library for the staff, over near my office, if you should want to read before retiring. It contains mainly medical books.’ Here he lowered his head and shot me a lightly mocking look. ‘Some of them may inform you about, shall we say, modern treatments, but there are also some novels and books of poetry, should you simply want relaxation.’

I thanked him and said I would walk back in that direction with him to find something to look at before I turned in. Letting him go ahead, I slipped the knife into my jacket pocket.

We made our way along the passage that led to the main entrance in silence. The place had settled down for the night and the gas lamps in the corridor were turned low. From somewhere far distant above us came a soft moan that could have been the sorrowful cries of patients or perhaps the lowing of the wind. I shivered to think of those lost souls, for whatever reason not at rest, who even now would be wandering the night, keening at their fate.

At his office door Morgan pointed me along a passage that ran at right angles to the one running the length of the house that we’d just come along. ‘The library is at the end of this passage, last door on the left. You’ll need a light.’

The corridor was completely dark. He went into his office and emerged with a lit candle on a brass holder. He handed it to me, together with some matches. ‘Not all the property is fitted with gas.’

We said goodnight and this time I proffered my hand in order to allay any suspicions he might have harboured about my reluctance to shake with him earlier. Once again his firm grip on my bruised bones invoked an involuntary grimace that I did my best to disguise as a smile. He went into his office and shut the door behind him, cutting off the light from within and plunging me into a twilight world.

Shadows brought to life by my feeble candle flickered on the walls and I could not see very far along the passage ahead of me. ‘Darkness be my friend,’ I said, although it didn’t fit, because for once I didn’t need its cloak to hide me, but saying it somehow made me feel less afraid, for I confess I was, although I could not have told you exactly why. There was something so eerie about the place, what with that constant distant moan, the misery of so many forlorn ghosts, that a depression settled upon me and began to seep into my very core. A book would do me good, to divert my thoughts to something sunnier, and I set off along the dim passage, although not with any great confidence. I could not help myself from creeping, treading softly, for the sound of my own footsteps bothered me as though they might be those of another, or perhaps for fear the noise might awaken some sleeping enemy as yet still hidden from me. Eventually I reached the end of the corridor and found the door to the library. It opened with a creak like a sound effect from one of those old melodramas in which it has too often been my misfortune to be involved.

It wasn’t a very big room, only the size of a modest drawing room, which made me think reading and literature had not been a priority for whoever had had the place built as a private residence. All four walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves of books. I walked around the room, casting the light of my candle over the spines. On first inspection their bindings all appeared old, foxed and mildewed, the gilt titles faded and their shine dulled. The place had the graveyard scent of mouldy neglect and I supposed the room and its contents had fallen into disuse once the place was turned into a hospital. Who here would want to read books now? The patients weren’t allowed; Morgan had told me as much. The attendants had struck me as ignorant and uneducated, and that left only the doctors, and evidently not many of them had been of a literary turn of mind, because the dust on the shelves showed the volumes upon them had rested undisturbed for some considerable time. In one small section, though, I came upon books that were relatively new, the wood of the shelves cleaner, showing they had been taken out and put back. A closer look revealed they were all upon medical subjects, mostly to do with mental illness. I read their titles, which were so mystifying to me they might as well have been in Japanese, and I could not decide upon one to favour above the others and consequently, in the end, didn’t examine any of them more closely. I was tired and not in the mood and, even though it would have been sensible to begin at once my education in my new profession, I understood myself sufficiently well to know I would not read anything about it tonight.

I went to the next section, which was comprised of the ubiquitous ancient worn stock, and here struck gold in a large, shabby volume and had no need to look further. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in a handsome though battered edition. I set my candle down upon a small table and took the book from the shelf. It fell open at the Scottish Play. I shivered. Was this a bad omen? It was certainly not what I would have chosen to read in such a setting and I was about to turn to something lighter, one of the comedies, when at that very moment my candle flickered. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as from behind me came the plaintive creak of the door. There was the patter of bare feet over floorboards and I swivelled round in time to see a wisp of white, the hem of a woman’s dress or nightgown, whisk around the edge of the door, its wearer seemingly fleeing after finding me there, and pulling the door shut behind her with such a slam the draught from it killed my candle dead.

It was pitch dark. I fumbled about, feeling for the candle, but succeeded only in barking my shin against some piece of furniture, drawing from me an involuntary oath. I shuddered at the sound of my own voice, as though if I only managed to keep quiet the intruder would ignore me, which, of course, was plain stupid of me. I remonstrated with myself for my cowardliness, asking myself why I, who had lately been in a far worse situation, was so fearful. I could only put it down to my being here, in this madhouse, where I should not have been, although I had every right to be here, so far as anyone else knew.

I felt about with my hands stretched out in front of me like a blind man, trying to remember exactly where I had set down the candleholder, but in my panic could remember nothing of the room. I told myself I must think clearly and sucked in a couple of deep breaths, got myself calm again and eventually laid my hand on the candleholder. I found the box of matches Morgan had placed on it and fumbled one out and struck it, the noise like an explosion in the dead silence of the night. I had great difficulty in applying the flame to the wick, my hand was shaking so. The match went out and I struggled to light another, the light flickering wildly as my fingers trembled. I steadied myself and at last the thing was lit. As visibility returned and the edges of the room fell into place, so my terror abated. I felt as if I had seen a ghost, and indeed it was not too fanciful to believe that I had. That fleeting suggestion of white dress, the patter of feet – it was all the stuff of tales of hauntings.

It was with some trepidation that I eased open the door, in dread of its rusty creaking. All this achieved was to protract the noise of its unoiled hinges, which took on the sound of a small animal, or some ghostly child perhaps, being tortured. As soon as there was enough of an opening, I insinuated myself around the edge of the door and shuffled my way along the passage outside, fearing that at any moment the spectre would come rushing at me and – and – and what? That’s the thing about terror: it’s the not knowing that gets to you and what your mind makes up instead. I stood still a moment, took another deep breath and rationalised what had happened. I had seen a hint of female garment. It was a woman and I was a strong fit man; what did I have to be afraid of? But then I began to think what woman it might be. The most likely was one of the attendants, of course, because by now the inmates were all safely locked in their dormitories (safely as long as there wasn’t a fire!). But what if one should have escaped somehow? What then? What if she were violent? I shuddered at the thought of some madwoman launching herself out of the shadows at me and found myself twitching with every flicker of the candle flame, at every dancing shadow on the walls.

It seemed an age before I achieved the end of the passage. The gas lamps in the main corridor had now been extinguished and there was no light showing under Morgan’s door, so I guessed he must have retired for the night. The silence overwhelmed me because every instant I expected it to be broken by that other presence I had glimpsed. I made my way up the main staircase, treading as softly as I could, for it was old and as creaky as the library door and apt to groan a protest at every step. On the second floor everything was unfamiliar in the weak candlelight and I made several false turns before I found the right passageway and at long last made my way toward the safety of my room.