The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

She let her thoughts run free. She knew perfectly well that Savage, after years of enforced solitude, during which he had been afforded no prospect of a woman's love, was unlikely to be coming to her room just for a bundle of clothes. If he wanted to get into bed with her, what then, ought she to raise the house? She imagined calling out (though not until he was gone), and her door opening, and the bare shanks of the rescuers jostling in their nightshirts--the visiting preacher, Mr Luke, her father, the upstairs lodgers--and she prayed for grace. She thought of the forgiven--Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, the wife of Hosea who had been a prostitute, Mary Magdalene, Mrs Watson who had cohabited with a drunken man.

The title story of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Ways of Escape concerns a young Australian girl who discovers an escaped convict hiding in a rural church. Dressed in a hood, she can't see his face, and so she is able to project her young desires and fears onto him--not that he's young or handsome, exactly; she never rises quite to that level of imagination, but that he's arrived to carry her away on a tide of romance, in its older meaning. She waits for him to climb into her bedroom for a set of clothes as promised, but he never shows, and she discovers in the morning that he's run off with a much older servant woman.

This ending is a little too much of a punchline; it doesn't do justice to Fitzgerald's powers of plotting. But the story works because Fitzgerald captures young Alice's perspective so well: never over-wild, but callow and apprehensive, perhaps even purposely refusing to follow the line of her thoughts in order to let the mysterious event of her life happen. The convict has an analogue in the title character of "The Red-Haired Girl," a servant and painter's muse who ends up sacked for petty theft--how paltry the objects of our fascination turn out to be! But there's real magic, too, to be had, as with the title character of "Beehernz," a reclusive conductor living on a remote Scottish isle who is convinced to return and conduct a major orchestra because of the simple folk song idly sung by a woman who seems to the story in other ways entire irrelevant.

I really loved "Desideratus," a story about a poor boy who loses a precious medal--there's the great Penelopean image of the boy discovering the medal at the bottom of a puddle and ice and having to return after the thaw, only to find it gone--and then traces it to a wealthy estate, where a rich man pries the medal from the hands of his ill son. We never find out why the son was sick (did it have something to do with the ice and the thaw?) or whether the rich man is serious when he asks if the poor boy would trade the medal for a sum of money. We never find out anything else at all, because the lives of the rich and poor have only intersected here, once, obliquely, and then sundered to remain at arm's length.

But I must admit my favorite was "The Axe," a gruesome little ghost story framed as a memo from a middle manager to his boss, who has forced him to fire a long-time employee. That employee reemerges at the office with his neck severed, as if with the proverbial axe, and the middle manager rushes to his office, where, we learn, he's been writing the memo the whole time, not knowing whether the bloody apparition is still on the other side of the door. Fitzgerald was always so clever--and yet her work hardly ever seems too-clever or too neat; cleverness is always in service to a real human feeling. I'd long ago finished her novels, so it was a real treasure to discover this collection of stories, which I didn't even realize existed--none, perhaps, has quite the impact of her longer work, but it was great to luxuriate again in the work of such a peerless writer.