Penelope Fitzgerald - The Means of Escape

Mr Luke hoped that Miss Alice had found her time at the instrument well spent.

‘I could not get much done,’ she answered. ‘I was interrupted.’

‘Ah, it’s a sad thing for a performer to be interrupted. The concentration of the mind is gone. “When the lamp is shattered …”’

‘That is not what I felt at all,’ said Alice.

‘You are too modest to admit it.’

‘I have been thinking, Father,’ said Alice, ‘that since Mr Luke cares so much for music, it would be a good thing for him to try the seraphine himself. Then if by any chance I had to go away, you would be sure of a replacement.’

‘You speak as if my wife and I should be here always,’ cried Mr Luke.

Nobody made any comment on this – certainly not Mrs Luke, who passed her days in a kind of incredulous stupor. How could it be that she was sitting here eating bread pudding some twelve thousand miles from Clerkenwell, where she had spent all the rest of her life? The Rector’s attention had been drawn away by the visiting preacher, who had taken out a copy of the Hobart Town Daily Courier , and was reading aloud a paragraph which announced his arrival from Melbourne. ‘Bringing your welcome with you,’ the Rector exclaimed. ‘I am glad the Courier noted it.’ – ‘Oh, they would not have done,’ said the preacher, ‘but I make it my practice to call in at the principal newspaper offices wherever I go, and make myself known with a few friendly words. In that way, if the editor has nothing of great moment to fill up his sheet, which is frequently the case, it is more than likely that he will include something about my witness.’ He had come on a not very successful mission to pray that gold would never be discovered in Van Diemen’s Land, as it had been on the mainland, bringing with it the occasion of new temptations.

After the dishes were cleared Alice said she was going back for a while to Aggie’s, but would, of course, be home before dark. Mr Luke, while his wife sat on with half-closed eyes, came out to the back kitchen and asked Mrs Watson, who was at the sink, whether he could make himself useful by pumping up some more water.

‘No,’ said Mrs Watson.

Mr Luke persevered. ‘I believe you to have had considerable experience of life. Now, I find Miss Alice charming, but somewhat difficult to understand. Will you tell me something about her?’

‘No.’

Mrs Watson was, at the best of times, a very silent woman, whose life had been an unfortunate one. She had lost three children before being transported, and could not now remember what they had been called. Alice, however, did not altogether believe this, as she had met other women who thought it unlucky to name their dead children. Mrs Watson had certainly been out of luck with her third, a baby, who had been left in the charge of a little girl of ten, a neighbour’s daughter, who acted as nursemaid for fourpence a week. How the house came to catch fire was not known. It was a flash fire. Mrs Watson was out at work. The man she lived with was in the house, but he was very drunk, and doing – she supposed – the best he could under the circumstances, he pitched both the neighbour’s girl and the baby out of the window. The coroner had said that it might just as well have been a Punch and Judy show. ‘Try to think no more about it,’ Alice advised her. As chance would have it, Mrs Watson had been taken up only a week later for thieving. She had tried to throw herself in the river, but the traps had pulled her out again.

On arrival in Hobart she had been sent to the Female Factory, and later, after a year’s steady conduct, to the Hiring Depot where employers could select a pass-holder. That was how, several years ago, she had fetched up at the Rectory. Alice had taught her to write and read, and had given her (as employers were required to do in any case) a copy of the Bible. She handed over the book with a kiss. On the flyleaf she had copied out a verse from Hosea – ‘Say to your sister, Ruhaman , you have obtained mercy.’

Mrs Watson had no documents which indicated her age, and her pale face was not so much seamed or lined as knocked, apparently, out of the true by a random blow which might have been time or chance. Perhaps she had always looked like that. Although she said nothing by way of thanks at the time, it was evident, as the months went by, that she had transferred the weight of unexpended affection which is one of a woman’s greatest inconveniences on to Miss Alice. This was clear partly from the way she occasionally caught hold of Alice’s hand and held it for a while, and from her imitation, sometimes unconsciously grotesque, of Alice’s rapid walk and her way of doing things about the house.

Aggie had the tea, the bacon, the plum jam, and, on her own initiative, had added a roll of tobacco. This was the only item from the bond store and perhaps should have been left alone, but neither of the girls had ever met or heard of a man who didn’t smoke or chew tobacco if he had the opportunity. They knew that on Norfolk Island and at Port Arthur the convicts sometimes killed for tobacco.

They had a note of the exact cash value of what was taken. Alice would repay the amount to Shuckburgh’s Hotel from the money she earned from giving music lessons. (She had always refused to take a fee for playing the seraphine at St George’s.) But what of truth’s claim, what of honesty’s? Well, Alice would leave, say, a hundred and twenty days for Constancy to reach Portsmouth. Then she would go to her father.

‘What will you say to him?’ Aggie asked.

‘I shall tell him that I have stolen and lied, and caused my friend to steal and lie.’

‘Yes, but that was all in the name of the corporeal mercies. You felt pity for this man, who had been a prisoner, and was alone in the wide world.’

‘I am not sure that what I feel is pity.’

Certainly the two of them must have been seen through the shining front windows of the new terraced houses on their way up to the church. Certainly they were seen with their handcart, but this was associated with parish magazines and requests for a subscription to something or other, so that at the sight of it the watchers left their windows. At the top of the rise Aggie, who was longing to have a look at Alice’s lag, said, ‘I’ll not come in with you.’

‘But, Aggie, you’ve done so much, and you’ll want to see his face.’

‘I do want to see his face, but I’m keeping myself in check. That’s what forms the character, keeping yourself in check at times.’

‘Your character is formed already, Aggie.’

‘Sakes, Alice, do you want me to come in with you?’

‘No.’

‘Mr Savage,’ she called out decisively.

‘I am just behind you.’

Without turning round, she counted out the packages in their stout wrapping of whitish paper. He did not take them, not even the tobacco, but said, ‘I have been watching you and the other young lady from the tower.’

‘This situation can’t continue,’ said Alice. ‘There is the regular Moonah Men’s prayer meeting on Friday.’

‘I shall make a run for it tomorrow night,’ said Savage, ‘but I need women’s clothing. I am not of heavy build. The flesh came off me at Port Arthur, one way and another. Can you furnish me?’

‘I must not bring women’s clothes to the church,’ said Alice. ‘St Paul forbids it.’ But she had often felt that she was losing patience with St Paul.

‘If he won’t let you come to me, I must come to you,’ said Savage.

‘You mean to my father’s house?’

‘Tell me the way exactly, Miss Alice, and which your room is. As soon as the time’s right, I will knock twice on your window.’

‘You will not knock on it once!’ said Alice. ‘I don’t sleep on the ground floor.’