The Means of Escape

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The winter frosts began and at Michaelmas Jack had the day off school and thought, I had better try going that way again. He halted, as before, at the highest point, to look down at the great house and its chimneys, and then at the ice under his feet, for all the brooks, ponds, and runnels were frozen on every side of him, all hard as bone. In a little hole or depression just to the left hand of the path, something no bigger than a small puddle, but deep, and by now set thick with greenish ice as clear as glass, he saw, through the transparency of the ice, at the depth of perhaps twelve inches, the keepsake that Mrs Piercy had given him.

  He had nothing in his hand to break the ice. Well then, Jack Digby, jump on it, but that got him nowhere, seeing that his wretched pair of boots was soaked right through. ‘I’ll wait until the ice has gone,’ he thought. ‘The season is turning, we’ll get a thaw in a day or two.’

  On the next Sunday, by which time the thaw had set in, he was up there again, and made straight for the little hole or declivity, and found nothing. It was empty, after that short time, of ice and even of water. And because the idea of recovering the keepsake had occupied his whole mind that day, the disappointment made him feel lost, like a stranger to the country. Then he noticed that there was an earthenware pipe laid straight down the side of the hill, by way of a drain, and that this must very likely have carried off the water from his hole, and everything in it. No mystery as to where it led, it joined another pipe with a wider bore, and so down, I suppose, to the stable-yards, thought Jack. His Desideratus had been washed down there, he was as sure of that now as if he’d seen it go.

  Jack had never been anywhere near the house before, and did not care to knock at the great kitchen doors for fear of being taken for a beggar. The yards were empty. Either the horses had been taken out to work now that the ground was softer or else – which was hard to believe – there were no horses at Watching. He went back to the kitchen wing and tried knocking at a smallish side entrance. A man came out dressed in a black gown, and stood there peering and trembling.

  ‘Why don’t you take off your cap to me?’ he asked.

  Jack took it off, and held it behind his back, as though it belonged to someone else.

  ‘That is better. Who do you think I am?’

  ‘No offence, sir,’ Jack replied, ‘but you look like an old schoolmaster.’

  ‘I am a schoolmaster, that is, I am tutor to this great house. If you have a question to ask, you may ask it of me.’

  With one foot still on the step, Jack related the story of his godmother’s keepsake.

  ‘Very good,’ said the tutor, ‘you have told me enough. Now I am going to test your memory. You will agree that this is not only necessary, but just.’

  ‘I can’t see that it has anything to do with my matter,’ said Jack.

  ‘Oh, but you tell me that you dropped this-or-that in such-and-such a place, and in that way lost what had been given to you. How can I tell that you have truthfully remembered all this? You know that when I came to the door you did not remember to take your cap off.’

  ‘But that—’

  ‘You mean that was only lack of decent manners, and shows that you come from a family without self-respect. Now, let us test your memory. Do you know the Scriptures?’

  Jack said that he did, and the tutor asked him what happened, in the fourth chapter of the Book of Job, to Eliphaz the Temanite, when a vision came to him in the depth of the night.

  ‘A spirit passed before his face, sir, and the hair of his flesh stood up.’

  ‘The hair of his flesh stood up,’ the tutor repeated. ‘And now, have they taught you any Latin?’ Jack said that he knew the word that had been on his medal, and that it was Desideratus, meaning long wished-for.

  ‘That is not an exact translation,’ said the tutor. Jack thought, he talks for talking’s sake.

  ‘Have you many to teach, sir, in this house?’ he asked, but the tutor half closed his eyes and said, ‘None, none at all. God has not blessed Mr Jonas or either of his late wives with children. Mr Jonas has not multiplied.’

  If that is so, Jack thought, this schoolmaster can’t have much work to do. But now at last here was somebody with more sense, a house-keeperish-looking woman, come to see why the side-door was open and letting cold air into the passages. ‘What does the boy want?’ she asked.

  ‘He says he is in search of something that belongs to him.’

  ‘You might have told him to come in, then, and given him a glass of wine in the kitchen,’ she said, less out of kindness than to put the tutor in his place. ‘He would have been glad of that, I daresay.’

  Jack told her at once that at home they never touched wine. ‘That’s a pity,’ said the housekeeper. ‘Children who are too strictly prohibited generally turn out drunkards.’ There’s no pleasing these people, Jack thought.

  His whole story had to be gone through again, and then again when they got among the servants in one of the pantries. Yet really there was almost nothing to tell, the only remarkable point being that he should have seen the keepsake clearly through almost a foot of ice. Still nothing was said as to its being found in any of the yards or ponds.

  Among all the to-ing and fro-ing another servant came in, the man who attended on the master, Mr Jonas, himself. His arrival caused a kind of disquiet, as though he were a foreigner. The master, he said, had got word that there was a farm-boy, or a schoolboy, in the kitchens, come for something that he thought was his property.

  ‘But all this is not for Mr Jonas’s notice,’ cried the tutor. ‘It’s a story of child’s stuff, a child’s mischance, not at all fitting for him to look into.’

  The man repeated that the master wanted to see the boy.

  The other part of the house, the greater part, where Mr Jonas lived, was much quieter, the abode of gentry. In the main hall Mr Jonas himself stood with his back to the fire. Jack had never before been alone or dreamed of being alone with such a person. What a pickle, he thought, my godmother, Mrs Piercy, has brought me into.

  ‘I daresay you would rather have a sum of money,’ said Mr Jonas, not loudly, ‘than whatever it is that you have lost.’

  Jack was seized by a painful doubt. To be honest, if it was to be a large sum of money, he would rather have that than anything. But Mr Jonas went on, ‘However, you had better understand me more precisely. Come with me.’ And he led the way, without even looking round to see that he was followed.

  At the foot of the wide staircase Jack called out from behind, ‘I think, sir, I won’t go any further. What I lost can’t be here.’

  ‘It’s poor-spirited to say “I won’t go any further”,’ said Mr Jonas.

  Was it possible that on these dark upper floors no one else was living, no one was sleeping? They were like a sepulchre, or a barn at the end of winter. Through the tall passages, over uneven floors, Mr Jonas, walking ahead, carried a candle in its candlestick in each hand, the flames pointing straight upwards. I am very far from home, thought Jack. Then, padding along behind the master of the house, and still twisting his cap in one hand, he saw in dismay that the candle flames were blown over to the left, and a door was open to the right.

  ‘Am I to go in there with you, sir?’

  ‘Are you afraid to go into a room?’

  Inside it was dark and in fact the room probably never got much light, the window was so high up. There was a glazed jug and basin, which reflected the candles, and a large bed which had no curtains, or perhaps, in spite of the cold, they had been drawn back. There seemed to be neither quilts nor bedding, but a boy was lying there in a linen gown, with his back towards Jack, who saw that he had red or reddish hair, much the same colour as his own.

  ‘You may go near him, and see him more clearly,’ Mr Jonas said. ‘His arm is hanging down, what do you make of that?’

  ‘I think it hangs oddly, sir.’

  He remembered what the tutor had told him, that Mr Jonas had not multiplied his kind, and asked, ‘What is his name, sir?’ To t
his he got no answer.

  Mr Jonas gestured to him to move nearer, and said, ‘You may take his hand.’

  ‘No, sir, I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not? You must touch other children very often. Wherever you live, you must sleep the Lord knows how many in a bed.’

  ‘Only three in a bed at ours,’ Jack muttered.

  ‘Then touch, touch.’

  ‘No, sir, no, I can’t touch the skin of him!’

  Mr Jonas set down his candles, went to the bed, took the boy’s wrist and turned it, so that the fingers opened. From the open fingers he took Jack’s medal, and gave it back to him.

  ‘Was it warm or cold?’ they asked him later. Jack told them that it was cold. Cold as ice? Perhaps not quite as cold as that.

  ‘You have what you came for,’ said Mr Jonas. ‘You have taken back what was yours. Note that I don’t deny it was yours.’

  He did not move again, but stood looking down at the whiteish heap on the bed. Jack was more afraid of staying than going, although he had no idea how to find his way through the house, and was lucky to come upon a back staircase which ended not where he had come in but among the sculleries, where he managed to draw back the double bolts and get out into the fresh air.

  ‘Did the boy move,’ they asked him, ‘when the medal was taken away from him?’ But by this time Jack was making up the answers as he went along. He preferred, on the whole, not to think much about Watching. It struck him, though, that he had been through a good deal to get back his godmother’s present, and he quite often wondered how much money Mr Jonas would in fact have offered him, if he had had the sense to accept it. Anyone who has ever been poor – even if not as poor as Jack Digby – will sympathize with him in this matter.

  About the Author

  Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She was the author of nine novels, three of which – The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels – were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And she won the Prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her most recent novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the ‘Book of the Year’. It won America’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and this helped introduce her to a wider international readership.

  A superb biographer and critic, Penelope Fitzgerald was also the author of lives of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (her first book), the poet Charlotte Mew and The Knox Brothers – a study of her remarkable father Edmund Knox, editor of Punch, and his equally remarkable brothers.

  Penelope Fitzgerald did not embark on her literary career until the age of sixty. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, she worked at the BBC during the war, edited a literary journal, ran a bookshop and taught at various schools, including a theatrical school; her early novels drew upon many of these experiences.

  She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.

  Praise

  The Means of Escape was chosen as ‘Book of the Year’ by the following reviewers: Alex Clark (Guardian), David Sexton (Evening Standard), Jane Gardam (Spectator), Humphrey Carpenter (Sunday Times), John Murray-Browne (Financial Times), Polly Samson (Independent), Adam Mars-Jones (Observer), Hermione Lee (Guardian), Simon Brett (Daily Mail) and Julian Barnes (Observer).

  From the reviews:

  ‘The Means of Escape is full of obscure adversity. There is a dogsbody caretaker with a dubious past, a clerical assistant who is given the sack and who returns to haunt his persecutor in a ghost story of extreme, even gleeful, ghoulishness. Fitzgerald’s world is luminous, dark and unflinching but the stories are filled with her characteristic tender, humorous apprehension of human oddness and ordinariness.’ HERMIONE LEE, TLS

  ‘The sense of something colossal at the last being revealed through a tiny turn of phrase, or even a single word, proved one of Fitzgerald’s most remarkable devices. At the end of many of her most marvellous things there is a sense of a great window suddenly opening. That visionary final twist of the screw is unforgettably indulged in these stories. If you miss the significance of the word “a watch” in the last paragraph of “The Red-Haired Girl”, you will not just not understand the depth of love the heroine bears for its painter hero, but miss the point of the whole story … This is a small book, but a remarkably rich one. It sets the seal on a career we, as readers, can only count ourselves lucky to have lived through.’

  PHILIP HENSHER, Spectator

  ‘Eerie, spry, and comic. Each piece expands miraculously in the mind.’ Harpers & Queen

  ‘This collection is excellent … a revelation. “Desideratus” – the story of a poor boy, a lost medal, and an ordeal in a great mysterious house – is strange, magical, moving … the sense of things beyond the grasp of intellect.’

  ALLAN MASSIE, Scotsman

  ‘This collection contains some of Fitzgerald’s best observations. Each precise word earns its worth, and the prose falls upon the inner ear with deceptive simplicity. A great writer, an ironist in the tradition of Jane Austen, as alive as Henry James to the covert power-play which makes up so much of human intercourse.’

  SALLEY VICKERS, Financial Times

  ‘In the world of these stories, fellow human beings bristle with indefinable menace. Their motives and purposes are incomprehensible, even to a comical degree. Life itself, these stories seem to say, is a delicate equipoise, kept aloft by all manner of imperceptible motions, and the journey from A to B is a graceful navigation through horrors. This is a wonderful collection – terrifying, beautiful and funny.’ The Tablet

  ‘A farewell of undiminishing grace … spare, witty and understated’ Boston Globe

  ‘“There is nothing really lasting, nothing that will endure, except the sincere expression of the actual conditions of life,” a character quotes. “Conditions in the potato patch, in the hayfield, at the washtub, in the open street!” This is what Fitzgerald captures in her writing, and why she will endure.’

  Los Angeles Times ‘Best Books of 2000’

  ‘I’m profoundly envious of people who haven’t read Fitzgerald. There are such treasures in store for them … The stories collected in The Means of Escape are a distillation of her formidable talent. They display that blend of truthful observation and deadpan comedy that stamped everything she wrote.’ The Age (Australia)

  Also by the Author

  EDWARD BURNE-JONES

  THE KNOX BROTHERS

  THE GOLDEN CHILD

  THE BOOKSHOP

  OFFSHORE

  HUMAN VOICES

  AT FREDDIE’S

  CHARLOTTE MEW AND HER FRIENDS

  INNOCENCE

  THE BEGINNING OF SPRING

  THE GATE OF ANGELS

  THE BLUE FLOWER

  Copyright

  HarperPress

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  Published by HarperPress 2001

  First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2000

  This collection © the Estate of Penelope Fitzgerald 2000

  ‘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 1
989: first published in Prize Writing, Hodder & 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.

  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.

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