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The Town Experiment, chapter one	By : BiancaPearl Category: M through R > Maurice Views: 1286 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Maurice, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-The Town Experiment, chapter one
- 1
The Town Experiment
NOTE: This story carries on from after E.M. Forster's unpublished epilogue to Maurice. In the epilogue, Kitty, on a cycling holiday, comes across Maurice & Alec working as woodcutters (and living rough). They have an unsatisfactory interview, she dresses him down, Maurice barely speaks to her, and she eventually cycles off in a strop, swearing she won't tell anyone she even saw him.
Chapter One
Of course they always knew they'd have to move.

They'd been in the cottage over a year; so long that it was almost coming to feel like something permanent. That was an illusion, of course. Their only reality was change – moving on, changing jobs, changing accommodation. It had been nice to live in a house again though. Sleeping rough had proved too hard on health and spirit and so they’d taken a chance and rented this place. The final impetus for the latest move - to the cottage - had come when Kitty so unexpectedly and dramatically appeared back in his life eighteen months ago. Strange, how things turned out.

.Although he’d spurned her when they saw her, eventually he’d written - after much urging ("nagging", Maurice had called it) from Alec. He’d apologised, even explained himself after a fashion and had even received a couple of letters in reply. Kitty’s writing style showed she still didn’t like him much, or approve of him, but her letters had been quite illuminating about the situation back home. She couldn’t help herself so it seemed, but indulge in a bit of gossip. Typical. Alec had addressed the envelope for him so no one at his old home would recognise the handwriting - an unnecessary precaution probably as it sounded like his mother was past noticing anything much anyway.
Alec had been so keen that Maurice re-establish some sort of connection with his family. He didn't, couldn't understand why Maurice felt so alienated from them, such antipathy toward them when by all accounts they sounded like decent, respectable, normal women who positively looked up to Maurice as only son and head of the household. Because Alec didn't dislike his family at all. He loved them in fact, and had struggled to come to terms with his actions in abandoning them like he had with no word of explanation. He was especially concerned for his parents who weren't young: Alec had been the "surprise," the late-arriving baby of the family, younger by a stretch of years than his brothers and sisters. Made much of by all as a result.

Even in the midst of the passionate intensity, the ecstatic happiness that bound Alec and Maurice together so closely during those first few months after the fateful sailing of the Normannia , it was obvious that Alec was suffering intense pangs of remorse and shame for what he'd done to his family, though he said little. After a while, Maurice had drawn a sum out of his bank account and offered to send it to Fred in the Argentine as recompense for the expense of Alec's passage. Alec had argued - his pride demanded it - but in the end he acquiesced with evident relief and sent the money and a letter that didn't actually explain anything but expressed his regret.

The letter and money were returned without comment.

Alec had written at about the same time and along the same lines to his parents. That letter wasn't returned but although Alec had spent months religiously visiting twice a week the small village post-office that he had given as his care-of address, no reply had ever come.
It was a warm spring night some three months after Kitty. Maurice woke slowly from a deep sleep. He'd been playing rugby in his dream, flying into a tackle, the onlookers shouting their approval. His eyes opened and he sat up in bed, heart thumping. There were shouts, real ones, out there in the woods. Getting closer, and there was nothing friendly about them. Yahooing, drunken laughter. Alec was awake now too; very still, listening. Maurice could see his eyes flicking back and forth by the moonlight coming in through a gap in the shutters. There were times that Alec reminded him of some half-wild creature - alert, tense, ready to fight or fly with a hair-trigger swiftness.

Crashing in the undergrowth now, getting ever nearer. How many? Three? Six? A dozen?

"Hey nancy-boys!" someone shouted. "Come out and play!" Cackles of laughter.

"What, you shy? I'm sure them arses is stretched enough by now to take us all on and more!"

Maurice turned cold. Surely they couldn't be serious? A beating he could understand but this...? To do the very thing to them that they despised them for doing? Actually, it did make a kind of perverted sense. And after all was done they'd still consider themselves real men.

"What should we...?"

But Alec had already leaped out of bed, pulled on his pants and sprinted for the other room. Maurice followed, caught up with him just as he'd pulled the gun down off the wall. It was always loaded. Maurice clutched his arm.

"Think about what you're doing!"

"Get off!" Alec wrenched his arm free and threw the door open. Without hesitation he fired two shots up into the air. The crack of the gunfire shockingly loud in the pristine stillness of the night. There was no more laughter, no more shouting, just the crashing sound of feet haring away through the undergrowth.

Away from them.

Maurice pulled Alec inside and bolted the door. He put the gun down carefully enough but Maurice could see that every muscle in his body was rigid and shaking, thrumming tight as a drum-skin. He started to cough, almost doubled up with it.

Maurice put an arm round his waist and led him to the table, sat him down in a chair, pulled up another and sat down beside him.

"I'd kill 'em all before they touched a single hair on your head." There was no doubting those words; so quietly spoken.

By mutual consent the two men didn't speak much about their separate experiences in France but something about the fierce, yet remote look In Alec's eyes told Maurice more clearly than a thousand words that he was remembering something. Some barbarity he's witnessed in that far-away place.

Maurice said nothing, just leaned his head on Alec's shoulder and stroked his neck until he stopped shaking.
The next morning they packed everything they could fit into their rucksacks and walked away.

Maurice had a plan. He'd had decided that this time they should hide in plain sight.

The very features that had made the cottage so appealing to them - its isolation, remoteness from other human beings and prying eyes - were paradoxically the very reasons why they were so very vulnerable there, should someone with malevolent intent actually take an interest.

Despite the humble nature of their recent accommodations, Maurice in fact had a nest-egg. Several weeks after the boathouse, once Maurice had calmed down sufficiently to think coherently again, he'd realised that he had to take care of things. He was responsible for Alec now, he who'd induced him to give up everything for love. Because of his decision to cleave himself to Maurice, Alec had been left in effect penniless. Almost everything he had earned at Penge had been spent on his kit for the Argentine, almost every personal possession packed up in a chest and at that time on a boat mid-ocean somewhere heading for said country.

So Maurice had written to his lawyer, instructed him to wind up and sort out business affairs that needed it, given him permission to administer Maurice's bank accounts and investments in absentia. Maurice's investments had indeed been wise which is why it had been so very galling to hear via Kitty’s letters of the lies that the Durham women had been spreading about him. Financial mismanagement, indeed. Anything to deflect negative attention from dear Clive and his sparkling career. He'd obviously let them in on Maurice's disgraceful secret. In fact, in his more paranoid moments Maurice suspected that most everyone knew except poor hapless Mother, Kitty and Ada. Alec claimed that Simcox knew everything about everything that happened in that house by some strange second-sight or process of osmosis but could be relied upon to say and do nothing except mildly torment Clive with the odd cryptic comment. "That's what the old coot lives for," he'd explained.

Mr Borenius must surely have guessed, Mr Hall and Scudder both disappearing so mysteriously into thin air on the very same day. After having come across Maurice on board the Normannia that day even the parson could not fail to make the final connection in his mind. God knows what Alec's parents had ever been told, if anything. The feelings, concerns and worries of the butcher of Osmington (retired) would not have loomed large in anyone at Penge's thoughts.

At any rate, Maurice had kept up a regular correspondence with his solicitor and his wealth had indeed grown somewhat even with the lawyer's fees extracted. Now was the time to make use of some of it, though he had intended to save it for their old age. They had been so fixed for so long upon earning their daily keep and not drawing down on their capital, and had done a good job of that so far too. But the best-laid plans must sometimes change, that much he had learnt.

Maurice was going to rent them a house. In a town. Or rather a small city, large enough that they could live comfortably anonymous lives. But not so big as to be the sort of teeming rat-hole that would drive Alec to despair.
He explained all this to Alec on the train carrying them away from the county that had been their home these last fifteen months. His friend's reaction wasn't quite as positive as he could have wished. In fact, his mouth literally dropped open in shock.

“Are you mad? What're the likes of us going to do in a town?"

"I can get work. I'm good with figures." A reference from Hill & Hall had obviously been out of the question - he knew for a fact that his father's old partner hadn't taken at all kindly to young Hall's abandonment of his post, so to speak. Yet surely he'd be able to get something - far humbler of course, but something.

"I've never lived in a town.”

"You'll get used to it. We need to be near a decent doctor."

Alec sucked on his cigarette and looked out the window, face like thunder. For Maurice had brought up a most unpopular topic: Alec's cough. His mood not helped one bit by the face that he started coughing right there and then, as if to underline Maurice's very point. He obstinately refused to admit that there was anything wrong let alone seek help for it, but every time Maurice heard that deep, wrenching, hacking sound a part of him went cold inside.

It was Alec's most visible legacy from the war.

He'd promised they would never be parted - but they had been, by a force far beyond their control. Neither was it an especial curse or persecution visited upon Maurice and Alec alone because of what they were. It had been far worse than that. A scourge that had ripped through an entire generation of young men in their prime without fear or favour, tearing them from the arms of parents, sweethearts and wives. Three years apart - they'd caught a couple of glimpses of each other as they marched past in opposite directions, and spent one day clinging desperately together in a cheap hotel room in Marseilles when they'd both happened to have leave at the same time. Strangely, that had been almost worse than not seeing one another at all. They both made it though relatively unscathed until almost the very end when Alec had succumbed to the Spanish flu. Maurice had caught the milder version but Alec was struck by the deadly second wave and almost died in some wretched field hospital. All Alec would say on the subject was that they were blessed to have both emerged whole from the entire experience and a little cough never hurt anyone. But Maurice feared his lungs had been permanently weakened, and in winter especially the cough would always start up again.

"It's not all bad in the city," he said.

"You think. And what will I do I'd like to know while you're off writing numbers in a ledger all day or whatever it is you do? I won't be a kept man."

"And I won't be keeping you. You can get a job." Maurice had realised that much, that any such arrangement would poison their friendship more surely than just about anything else. Alec's pride wouldn't take it.

"Doing what?"

"We'll think of something."

"I won't pose as your servant neither."

"Of course not."

"People will notice we're living together. It's not like you and Clive swanning around London and staying in that town apartment of his. I needn't remind you why."

"Alec, listen. We can't live out in the middle of nowhere any more. It's too dangerous."

"And this isn't?"

"Let's just try. Please."

"All right, Maurice. All right. But I'm not going to no doctor."
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The Town Experiment, chapter one