The Means of Escape

The Means of Escape is a 2000 short story collection by Penelope Fitzgerald, published shortly after her death. It was first issued as a series of eight (later eleven) stories, most of which were first published between 1975 and 1998.

The story is set in the mid-19th-century, in the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land. Alice Godley, daughter of the rector of the English Church in Hobart, lives a constrained life working in the local laundry and playing the seraphine in her father's church. She lives quietly at the rectory with her father, two lodgers, and the housekeeper Mrs Watson. Mrs Watson was originally a transported convict who, having served seven years, now has her ticket of leave.

One day, alone in the church, Alice is surprised by an escaped prisoner in felon's clothing and hood who tells her that he is an educated man, a poisoner by the name of Savage. Although fearful, she feels herself attracted to him and agrees to hide him in the church, bringing him food over several days. Savage tells her that he needs women's clothes to make good his escape on the next ship bound for England, and they arrange for him to come to her house under cover of darkness. He tells her that when he reaches England he will invite her to join him. Alice waits expectantly all night, but Savage does not appear.

Eight months later, Alice receives a letter from England. Savage says that in the darkness that night he had mistaken her room, and had accidentally gone into that of Mrs Watson. The housekeeper had welcomed him, provided him with the necessary clothes, and decided on the spur of the moment to accompany him to England herself.

The story is narrated by a bureaucratic middle-manager of a small firm, who has been forced by the firm's owner to make his ageing clerical assistant, WS Singlebury, redundant. Singlebury lives alone, has worked for years in the same small cubbyhole, and says that he does not know what he will do if he is forced to leave. A damp smell that has been permeating the office for some time gets worse after Singlebury's departure, becoming a putrid stench.

Returning late at night to his office after accidentally leaving the lights on, the narrator feels a sense of creeping tension. Shuffling along the corridor to his cubbyhole is Singlebury, with his throat cut from ear to ear. The narrator retreats into his office, locks himself in, and sits writing a report on the incident, unable to bring himself to look behind him to see whether there is blood seeping under the door.

A group of young English artists travel to Paris in 1882 to practise plein air painting. One of the group, Hackett, searches for a female model and finds at his hotel the ideal candidate: a young red-haired servant girl called Annik, with a blank expression, "built for hard use and hard wear". He engages her, and tells her to come to be painted at specific time, wearing a red shawl. She will be paid once the painting is complete.

Over several sessions, Hackett becomes increasingly frustrated and angry with Annik, not understanding that her poverty means that she has no means of accurately determining the time, has no shawl of her own and no friend from whom she could borrow one. She complains "you don't know what I want, and you don't know what I feel". Hackett realises that he knows nothing of Annik's heart, but his realisation comes too late and Annik has disappeared. Initially he fears that she may have killed herself, but ultimately discovers from one of the servants that she has been dismissed for stealing from the hotel - some money, and a watch.