The Means of Escape. Penelope Fitzgerald

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СКАЧАТЬ you go straight to your father, or to Colonel Johnson at the Constabulary? I don’t wish you to answer me at once, because it mightn’t be the truth. But tell me this: would you have acted in the same manner, if it had been a woman hiding in the church?’ Alice was silent, and Aggie said, ‘Did a sudden strong warmth spring up between the two of you?’

      ‘I think that it did.’

      No help for it, then, Aggie thought. ‘He’ll be hard put to it, I’m afraid. There’s no water in the tower, unless the last lot of builders left a pailful, and there’s certainly no dunny.’ But Alice thought he might slip out by night. ‘That is what I should do myself, in his place.’ She explained that Savage was an intelligent man, and that he intended to stow away on Constancy.

      ‘My dear, you’re not thinking of following him?’

      ‘I’m not thinking at all,’ said Alice.

      They were in the hotel, checking the clean linen. So many tablecloths, so many aprons, kitchen, so many aprons, dining-room, so many pillow shams. They hardly ever talked without working. They knew their duties to both their families.

      Shuckburgh’s had its own warehouse and bond store on the harbour front. Aggie would find an opportunity to draw out, not any of the imported goods, but at least a ration of tea and bacon. Then they could see about getting it up to the church.

      ‘As long as you didn’t imagine it, Alice!’

      Alice took her arm. ‘Forty-five!’

      They had settled on the age of forty-five to go irredeemably cranky. They might start imagining anything they liked then. The whole parish, indeed the whole neighbourhood, thought that they were cranky already, in any case, not to get settled, Aggie in particular, with all the opportunities that came her way in the hotel trade.

      ‘He left this behind,’ said Alice, opening her music case, which let fly a feral odour. She pulled out the sacking mask, with its slits, like a mourning pierrot’s, for eyes.

      ‘Do they make them wear those?’

      ‘I’ve heard Father speak about them often. They wear them every time they go out of their cells. They’re part of the new system, they have to prove their worth. With the masks on, none of the other prisoners can tell who a man is, and he can’t tell who they are. He mustn’t speak either, and that drives a man into himself, so that he’s alone with the Lord, and can’t help but think over his wrongdoing and repent. I never saw one of them before today, though.’

      ‘It’s got a number on it,’ said Aggie, not going so far as to touch it. ‘I dare say they put them to do their own laundry.’

      

      At the Rectory there were five people sitting down already to the four o’clock dinner. Next to her father was a guest, the visiting preacher; next to him was Mrs Watson, the housekeeper. She had come to Van Diemen’s Land with a seven-year sentence, and now had her ticket to leave. Assigned servants usually ate in the backhouse, but in the Rector’s household all were part of the same family. Then, the Lukes. They were penniless immigrants (his papers had Mr Luke down as a scene-painter, but there was no theatre in Hobart). He had been staying, with his wife, for a considerable time.

      Alice asked them all to excuse her for a moment while she went up to her room. Once there, she lit a piece of candle and burned the lice off the seams of the mask. She put it over her head. It did not disarrange her hair, the neat smooth hair of a minister’s daughter, always presentable on any occasion. But the eyeholes came too low down, so that she could see nothing and stood there in stifling darkness. She asked herself, ‘Wherein have I sinned?’

      Her father, who never raised his voice, called from downstairs, ‘My dear, we are waiting.’ She took off the mask, folded it, and put it in the hamper where she kept her woollen stockings.

      After grace they ate red snapper, boiled mutton and bread pudding, no vegetables. In England the Reverend Alfred Godley had kept a good kitchen garden, but so far he had not been able to get either leeks or cabbages going in the thin earth round Battery Point.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ