The Girl Who Couldn’t Read. John Harding
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