Penelope Fitzgerald: The Means of Escape

The Age (Australia)

FICTION

The Golden Child

The Bookshop

Offshore

Human Voices

At Freddie’s

Innocence

The Beginning of Spring

The Gate of Angels

The Blue Flower

The Means of Escape

NON-FICTION

Edward Burne-Jones

The Knox Brothers

Charlotte Mew and her Friends

A House of Air: Selected Writings

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

STORIES

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2000

Copyright © the Estate of Penelope Fitzgerald 2000, 2016

‘The Means of Escape’ © Penelope Fitzgerald 1993: first published in the anthology Infidelity , Chatto & Windus, 1993 and New Writing 4 , Vintage, 1995; ‘The Axe’ © Jonathan Cape Ltd 1975; first published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories , Jonathan Cape, 1975; ‘The Red-Haired Girl’ © Penelope Fitzgerald 1998: first published in The Times Literary Supplement , 1998; ‘Beehernz’ © Penelope Fitzgerald 1997: first published in BBC Music Magazine , October 1997 and Fanfare , BBC Books, 1999; ‘The Prescription’ © Penelope Fitzgerald 1982: first published in the London Review of Books December 1982 and New Stories 8 , Hutchinson/Arts Council 1983; ‘At Hiruharama’ © Penelope Fitzgerald 1992: first published in New Writing , Minerva/Arts Council 1992; ‘Not Shown’ © Penelope Fitzgerald 1993: first published in the Daily Telegraph , 1993; ‘The Likeness’ © Penelope Fitzgerald 1989: first published in Prize Writing , Hodder and Stoughton, 1989; ‘Our Lives Are Only Lent To Us’ © the Estate of Penelope Fitzgerald 2001, previously unpublished; ‘Desideratus’ © Penelope Fitzgerald 1997: first published in New Writing 6 , Vintage/The British Council 1997; ‘Worlds Apart’ © the Estate of Penelope Fitzgerald 1983: first published in Woman magazine, 1989.

Preface © Hermione Lee 2013

Series advisory editor: Hermione Lee

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this collection

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photograph © Mary Evans

Cover design by nathanburtondesign.com

These stories are works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007105014

Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780007521418

Version: 2016-11-18

Contents

Cover

Preface by Hermione Lee

Praise

By the Same Author

Title Page

Copyright

The Means of Escape

The Axe

The Red-Haired Girl

Beehernz

The Prescription

At Hiruharama

Not Shown

The Likeness

Our Lives Are Only Lent To Us

Desideratus

Worlds Apart

About the Author

About the Publisher

St George’s Church, Hobart, stands high above Battery Point and the harbour. Inside, it looks strange and must always have done so, although (at the time I’m speaking of) it didn’t have the blue, pink and yellow-patterned stained glass that you see there now. That was ordered from a German firm in 1875. But St George’s has always had the sarcophagus-shaped windows which the architect had thought Egyptian and therefore appropriate (St George is said to have been an Egyptian saint). They give you the curious impression, as you cross the threshold, of entering a tomb.

In 1852, before the organ was installed, the church used to face east, and music was provided by a seraphine. The seraphine was built, and indeed invented, by a Mr Ellard, formerly of Dublin, now a resident of Hobart. He intended it to suggest the angelic choir, although the singing voices at his disposal – the surveyor general, the naval chaplain, the harbourmaster and their staffs – were for the most part male. Who was able to play the seraphine? Only, at first, Mr Ellard’s daughter, Mrs Logan, who seems to have got £20 a year for doing so, the same fee as the clerk and the sexton. When Mrs Logan began to feel the task was too much for her – the seraphine needs continuous pumping – she instructed Alice Godley, the Rector’s daughter.

Hobart stands ‘south of no north’, between snowy Mount Wellington and the River Derwent, running down over steps and promontories to the harbour’s bitterly cold water. You get all the winds that blow. The next stop to the south is the limit of the Antarctic drift ice. When Alice came up to practise the hymns she had to unlock the outer storm door, made of Huon pine, and the inner door, also a storm door, and drag them shut again.

The seraphine stood on its own square of Axminster carpet in the transept. Outside (at the time I’m speaking of) it was a bright afternoon, but inside St George’s there was that mixture of light and inky darkness which suggests that from the darkness something may be about to move. It was difficult, for instance, to distinguish whether among the black-painted pews, at some distance away, there was or wasn’t some person or object rising above the level of the seats. Alice liked to read mystery stories, when she could get hold of them, and the thought struck her now, ‘The form of a man is advancing from the shadows.’

If it had been ten years ago, when she was still a school-girl, she might have shrieked out, because at that time there were said to be bolters and escaped convicts from Port Arthur on the loose everywhere. The Constabulary hadn’t been put on to them. Now there were only a few names of runaways, perhaps twenty, posted up on the notice boards outside Government House.

‘I did not know that anyone was in the church,’ she said. ‘It is kept locked. I am the organist. Perhaps I can assist you?’

A rancid stench, not likely from someone who wanted to be shown round the church, came towards her up the aisle. The shape, too, seemed wrong. But that, she saw, was because the head was hidden in some kind of sack like a butchered animal, or, since it had eyeholes, more like a man about to be hung.