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One of the Regulars

At the back of Penelope Fitzgerald’s only short-story collection, The Means of Escape (2000), there is a charming black-and-white photograph of the author. It shows her buttoned into a high-collared shirt under a garment that appears to be an academic robe but could simply be a very large cardigan. Not quite smiling, she looks gentle yet distinguished, exactly as I remember her; and, as I looked at the photograph, there she was again and so was I, back in the old public library at the top of Highgate Hill in north London.

It was the Nineties. I was a librarian then and she was a reader, passing her books over the counter for me to discharge and stack on a trolley. As I did so, she flicked through the contents of another trolley, that week’s new purchases waiting to be stamped and issued, and quietly talked about the books she’d just read. It was always other people’s books, never her own. She lived close by with one of her daughters and was our most famous regular but also the most inconspicuous, usually in comfortable shoes and an old grey mac, always without a handbag, just a string bag for her books.

Much of her childhood in the Twenties was spent further up the hill, in Hampstead Village at 34 Well Walk, in a rented Queen Anne house on a street favoured by writers. John Keats once lived at
No. 46 and D. H. Lawrence at No. 32. She told me she learnt to read when she was 4 and remembered sheep grazing on Hampstead Heath. In 1941, after leaving Oxford with first-class honours in English Literature, she was working as a script editor at the BBC when mutual friends introduced her to Desmond Fitzgerald. They fell in love and got married but, all too soon, Desmond had to go away to fight in North Africa.

He returned with a Military Cross for gallantry but, over the ensuing years, it gradually became clear that he was an

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At the back of Penelope Fitzgerald’s only short-story collection, The Means of Escape (2000), there is a charming black-and-white photograph of the author. It shows her buttoned into a high-collared shirt under a garment that appears to be an academic robe but could simply be a very large cardigan. Not quite smiling, she looks gentle yet distinguished, exactly as I remember her; and, as I looked at the photograph, there she was again and so was I, back in the old public library at the top of Highgate Hill in north London.

It was the Nineties. I was a librarian then and she was a reader, passing her books over the counter for me to discharge and stack on a trolley. As I did so, she flicked through the contents of another trolley, that week’s new purchases waiting to be stamped and issued, and quietly talked about the books she’d just read. It was always other people’s books, never her own. She lived close by with one of her daughters and was our most famous regular but also the most inconspicuous, usually in comfortable shoes and an old grey mac, always without a handbag, just a string bag for her books. Much of her childhood in the Twenties was spent further up the hill, in Hampstead Village at 34 Well Walk, in a rented Queen Anne house on a street favoured by writers. John Keats once lived at No. 46 and D. H. Lawrence at No. 32. She told me she learnt to read when she was 4 and remembered sheep grazing on Hampstead Heath. In 1941, after leaving Oxford with first-class honours in English Literature, she was working as a script editor at the BBC when mutual friends introduced her to Desmond Fitzgerald. They fell in love and got married but, all too soon, Desmond had to go away to fight in North Africa. He returned with a Military Cross for gallantry but, over the ensuing years, it gradually became clear that he was an alcoholic. My father served in the same war and suffered from the same addiction, so I find it easy to imagine the tensions this caused within her family, the constant stress over money and the lack of stability. Penelope became the main breadwinner, teaching at various institutions while writing reviews and essays for newspapers and magazines, including Punch and the Times Literary Supplement. She also wrote a biography of one of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, Edward Burne-Jones. However, her first fictional venture may well have been ‘The Axe’, a short story in the form of an office work report that gradually becomes increasingly gruesome. It was published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories in 1975 and is now in The Means of Escape. It’s possible, as she once hinted, that she began writing fiction to amuse her husband. She certainly read to him during his last illness when he was in hospital. He died in 1976. The Means of Escape contains nine additional stories and an excellent introduction by A. S. Byatt, who also knew her a little. In the Sixties they both taught at Westminster Tutors, a posh crammer which prepared would-be students for their Oxford or Cambridge entrance exams, and between tutorials they sometimes enjoyed a coffee together. Byatt found that Penelope ‘appeared mild and retiring, [but she] could be suddenly sharp and incisive’. An observation that reminded me of an occasion when Penelope had taken part in a literary festival that I set up for Haringey Libraries. At Wood Green library she sat with the audience, listening to the other authors read their work before it was her turn to do so. I sat next to her, feeling privileged and excited. Penelope was definitely the star that night. Not only had she won a Booker Prize for her third novel, Offshore, but she was about to read us a chapter from her most recent novel, The Blue Flower, the first novel by a non-American to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. The hall was packed and I could tell that the audience was really looking forward to it, but first we had to listen to a lesser-known writer, a poet who, unfortunately, had no idea how clunky his poems were or how bored and restless his audience was growing. When at last he concluded and the audience rewarded him with a polite sprinkle of applause, he smiled and stepped forward. ‘Shall I read you some more?’ he asked. There was a shocked pause, an embarrassed silence, then Penelope intervened. ‘Oh no, dear. That’s quite enough.’ Her response seemed almost involuntary. She spoke in her normal speaking voice, not loudly, but into a silence that quickly turned into noisy clapping as the poet left the stage. I introduced her and then she gave her reading. As you might imagine, it went down extremely well. She wasn’t so retiring when she read, quite the opposite, her confidently delivered words capturing everyone’s attention. After the event, I offered to order her a taxi. ‘I never take taxis,’ she said. ‘Prefer a bus. Much nicer.’ She must have been 80 by then. I watched her walk off down Wood Green High Street, alone and looking rather vulnerable on a dark evening, and hoped she’d get home safely. As usual, she wore her old grey mac and carried no handbag, only a white plastic bag containing her copy of her novel. I imagined her sitting on the double-decker, squeezed in with the other passengers, and wondered if she’d be listening to their conversations, noting how they looked. A writer, I thought – of course she prefers a bus. She didn’t just rely on observation. She was a scrupulous fact-checker, often coming into the library to browse through the Reference volumes that no one else seemed to touch. Reading The Means of Escape, I wondered if as well as researching distant times she might also have liked long-distance travel. Two of her stories are set in the southern hemisphere – one in Tasmania, one in New Zealand. Her characters include an elderly Turkish aunt giving a soirée, a malevolent Greek doctor and his intelligent assistant, and a group of young British artists painting en plein air, in Brittany. In the story ‘Beehernz’, the deputy artistic director of the Midland Music Festival wants to ask a once-renowned pianist to give another performance. Nearly forty years earlier Beehernz, the pianist, had quietly announced his retirement because he’d found Mahler’s Eighth Symphony ‘too noisy’. Now he lives on Reilig, a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland. Undeterred, the director optimistically draws up a contract and travels by ferry from Oban to Mull, from Mull to Iona, finally by small boat to Reilig. He arrives with two assistants only to find the pianist, now a frail old man in gumboots, living alone in a single-storey cottage with no radio, no books, no scores and a piano that makes no sound. He had no need of an audience ‘in a kingdom of potatoes and seabirds’. In her introduction, Byatt talks about Fitzgerald’s exactness of language which is apparent in all her work and especially in the short stories. On first reading them I made the mistake of galloping through, rejoicing in the elegance of each sentence but not fully understanding the characters’ dilemmas or decisions. It was only when I read them again, slowly, that so much more unfolded. In short stories, of course, it is often what is left out that says the most. In her essay ‘Following the Plot’ (published in House of Air, 2005) Fitzgerald says: ‘The short stories I wrote at the age of 8 or 9 did not bring me the success I hoped for, and years of formal education in English literature gradually taught me the uneasy moral status of plots. If they were of the extravagantly ingenious kind, they had to be “forgiven” or “over-looked” on behalf of the writer.’ The plots in her short stories are ingenious but extravagance is usually reserved for the imagery that cloaks them. The title story, ‘The Means of Escape’, set in Hobart in the 1850s, concerns a convict who first appears in church in front of the rector’s daughter Alice: ‘the head was hidden in some kind of sack like a butchered animal, or, since it had no eye holes, more like a man about to be hanged’. He tells her he has escaped from the Model Penitentiary and plans to stow away on a ship about to depart for Portsmouth. He wants some women’s clothing for a disguise. First Alice and then her friend Aggie agree to help him, but he disappears without their assistance. The mystery of how he disappears and who else helps him is only made clear to Alice eight months later when a letter arrives from Portsmouth. The reader is told that the letter, like so many other records of convict days, is now kept in the National Library of Tasmania. Of course this may also be a fiction, but it’s easy to ima-gine Penelope coming across a real letter and conjuring up the story. Her precisely chosen words allow time to flow across continents and through the centuries, evoking the smell of disappointment in a post-war London office, the look of a National Trust building with its herb and lavender garden, possibly suggested by Gertrude Jekyll, or the precious feel of a gilt medal given to an 11-year-old boy as a keepsake. Engraved on the medal is the date of his birthday – September 12, 1663. In an old album I have another keepsake, a photograph taken by a Highgate colleague who, on learning that we were threatened with closure, persuaded everyone in the library to pose on the front steps. There we all are, the caretaker, myself, a library assistant and various members of the public. Our regulars. Standing at the foot of the steps and to one side, wearing her old grey mac and being carefully inconspicuous, as usual, is Penelope. In fact, although nobody gave it away, all of us knew by then just how famous she really was – a wonderful novelist, biographer and essayist. It wasn’t until a little later when her collection was published, posthumously, that I realized she was also a remarkable short-story writer.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Linda Leatherbarrow 2019


About the contributor

Linda Leatherbarrow’s prize-winning and broadcast short stories are published in Essential Kit and Funny Things, Families.

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