Tess (19 page)

Gertrude invites Hardy into the low, gloomy cottage. He is writing a part for her, Hardy says. There will be a dramatization of
Desperate Remedies
and he is writing it especially for her. Will she …?

Florence dreams mournfully at her desk, over a pile of butcher's bills and unanswered correspondence. She sees Wessex running, turning into a squat old house by the side of a church, sees Wessex, so unfaithful, heartbreakingly disloyal, leap with delight at the skirts of the lovely young Gertrude Bugler as she opens the door.

Florence sees Hardy standing by the small, latticed window that
lets almost no light into the formal little square parlour that smells of the new furniture old Mr Bugler gave the couple for their wedding, polished and dusted and unused. She can feel Hardy's kiss, as once she had known it, first on her cheek and then on the nape of her neck …

Florence is woken from her sad reverie by the tickle of whiskers on her cheek, as Wessex, exuberantly returned from his treacherous expedition, leaps up on Florence's table and greets his mistress.

Florence can't help giving one of her rare laughs. Wessex's whiskers tickle her extremely.

But she is already scolding, moaning, blaming by the time Hardy returns, radiating health and confidence for all his eighty-one years. Wessex has sent the bills flying all over the floor … Florence will never be able to sort out the asylum of this household now …

Desperate remedies indeed! Florence witnesses the extraordinary new vitality of her ancient husband as he prepares for the November première of his dramatization. How his eyes gleam! His wastepaper basket starts to overflow with poems again – the
Winter Words
which mark his amazing creative energy so late in life and which will be published posthumously in 1928. Florence always goes through the rejected drafts of the poems before they go out to the incinerator at the back of the house – she stands there, hands deep in the pockets of the baggy cardigan which has now become the badge of her depression, her premature middle age. Eyes ringed with circles of tiredness, she sifts through the crumpled-up slips of paper. She has been through aeons of torture this way, finding the first attempts at love poems – to Emma Gifford, of course, in her incarnation as the lovely woman with whom Hardy spent such happy weeks in Cornwall all of fifty-two years ago – and to women he has longed for, loved and lost. By the time the poems are ready to go to the printer, the pain is dulled for Florence. She can smile serenely at the compliments handed out by his admirers to TH, as she calls the great man in her correspondence: she can appear as delighted as they at the skill with which the poet delineates all his
loves – except her, of course. Never a poem dedicated to Florence. She'd have to be dead for that to happen; and it seems pretty certain that, short of suicide on Florence's part, Hardy will go first.

Today, a beautiful May day with cherry blossom on the trees in the garden softening some of the ugly angularity of Max Gate, Florence has a strong instinct that she will find something particularly unpleasant among the wastepaper. She takes the wicker basket and tips it upside down, next to the roaring incinerator. On a day when the countryside dances in the pink and white blossom of magnolia and camellia – when Paradise, under a blue sky with sweet little clouds chasing around like lambs, could well be described as situated in Wessex – Florence, crouching by the flames, is in Hell.

She finds the piece of paper she knew in her heart was there. It doesn't have a poem, it's true – but, just as bad, the scrawl of an obsessed lover unable to stop himself from repeating over and over the name of the beloved. TESS TESS TESS TESS – and, yes, there it is, the entwined initials of the stupid little actress who hasn't moved far enough at all: GB, who married her cousin and lives in southwest Dorset, in Beaminster.

Florence's mouth twitches and sets in its now permanent downward droop. She tips all the wastepaper into the fire – but keeps the incriminating slip, stuffs it deep into the pocket of her cardigan. She knows now that she has a rival far more deadly than any of the others, even Emma. However many times she reads and rereads the words that are evidence of love, the pain will not be dulled by familiarity. In fact, she knows already that the pain will grow rather than diminish, this time round. Her husband – the very same man who left his first wife to die of neglect, so great was his love for Florence – has found his last love. The love of his life. Tess – who made him famous – has come to claim him at last. Tess lives.

Utterly forlorn, Florence walks into the garden and under the pretty trees. By the time the blossom has turned to fruit – and the apples have fallen to the ground – another half-year will have passed and Hardy and Gertrude will have been together all that time. Acting, rehearsing, smiling … Gertrude's great, dark eyes will have looked up soulfully into Hardy's for twenty-four weeks, and for at least four days a week out of the twenty-four. Florence stares at the
ground and in her mind's eye she sees the apples lying there, rotting (like the other staff, the gardener is disobedient and lazy: Florence can't run the place any better than Emma could). She sees the serpent as it slithers from the core of the brown apple, half-chewed already by slugs, by the decay of the dying year. It comes towards her, hissing. Florence steps back and lets out a cry of fear. Then she stifles it, claps her hand over her mouth. Her eyes widen with a more real terror. She is going mad … yes, she is … Hardy is so cool and cruel towards her, she doesn't sleep at night. Is it her time of life? She has wondered this aloud to her corresponding friends already. She's forty-five and it's a dangerous age, isn't it? Hot flushes, migraines … now she's even hallucinating things! Should she confide in a doctor? But she's afraid – she has a horrible feeling that her husband wouldn't mind at all if she was locked up.

But Thomas Hardy is happy. He's beaming all over his face. At first Florence can hardly believe it – he's pleased to see her! And so is Wessex, who bounds up and muddies her skirt with his paws.

Florence's face lights up. Perhaps everything is all right, really – it's just her silly time-of-life imagination that's been running away
with her. She and TH will be happy again – like in the old days, before Emma died, all of eleven years ago now.

Florence goes up to her husband and asks him, tenderly, how his morning has been. (Even at his age, Hardy can still walk long distances and Florence has a sudden ray of hope that that is just what he has been doing, innocently taking Wessex for a good country walk.)

– Very bad news about the play, Hardy says. (But then, why is he beaming so?)

– We'll have to replace Gertrude Bugler, he says.

Florence can hardly believe her ears. There
is
a remedy to her state of desperation – simple as the lancing of a boil. Remove Gertrude Bugler! A wave of guilt succeeds Florence's sense of relief. She is somehow responsible … the young actress is gravely ill … Florence, a crone, a wicked witch, summoned up the Devil out of the ground and sent him to kill her rival …

– Replace her? Florence says stupidly. With her dulled eyes she stares at the happy, wizened old man who stands before her.

– Gertrude is having a baby, Hardy says.

The baby – in the mind of the all-controlling male god that Thomas Hardy in his kingdom of Wessex has now become, is conceived out of the infatuation of a poet for his Muse. To underline his immortality, Hardy went around boasting at this time that he was as sexually vigorous as ever, at eighty-three. His biographers don't believe it – and Florence certainly doesn't, as she stands rooted to the spot on the bare windswept drive at Max Gate, with its ‘uninterrupted' views across the downs to the monument of the Admiral who Hardy claims so tiresomely as his forebear. Not for Florence, the claims of potency, made over port and cigars to such as Sir Sydney Cockerell,
confidant of both of the unhappy couple. Silent evenings … she as childless as Emma had been … No, TH must keep his boasts for the hour when the ladies have left the table.

So now, Baby Tess, I tell you that one day you will understand: how the spirit of Tess – like a self-pollinating shrub or bloom, a daphne or a dandelion that blows in on the wind, came to our mother, poor Mary Hewitt. Who went mad and saw visions and then left her husband and went to work for the Dowles down there on Chesil Beach. And then, though people didn't say such things in those days, became a witch.

Our mother Mary who would carry the seed of the next Tess in her – as indeed she did.

Now you know, Baby Tess, what visions your great-grandmother Mary saw when she ‘became unhinged'.

She saw the incarnations of all the women who had lived and suffered and died in this strange western part of the land: the Celts, who were free and worshipped wind and water; the Roman matrons who paced in the long, oppressive afternoons in their smart villas; the penitent, praying women in all the dusty churches in Wessex; and, of course, the witches.

Mary saw the Woman Clothed with the Sun, from the Book of Revelation. Like Joanna Southcott of Exeter just thirty miles away, Mary saw herself as the Redeemer.

The Redeemer of a world ‘blighted by male domination'. As she lay in the bed where they had to shackle her down at night, so loud were her cries and lashings-out, Mary dreamed herself in a manger. She was both the female Christ and the mother of the new Messiah.

When she woke it was to the plunge of the needle or the forced administering of Largactil.

Most of all, Mary dreamed that her daughter would hang. Twisting in the breeze – how Thomas Hardy loved the public execution of a female.

And in her terrible premonitory dream, our mother wept and begged the old story not to be played out again.

When she was sufficiently subdued, when the memories of the visions had been burned from her brain, they let her come home.

And as I take you home to the Mill, Baby Tess, now the bright morning brings curious stares from passers-by, I'll tell you of the last act of Tess. Before they dig up the shale in the dip of land at West Bay for construction purposes, later today.

Listen to me, as we walk back along the ridge above Powerstock, along the top of the grassy forts that stare out at the lagoon at Abbotsbury. We stop once and look across at the land that was my mother's and her mother's – rightfully their land, that is – but, on the distaff side, there was never anything of it for them. Marshwood Vale: Canute could conquer land, it would obey him, it couldn't slip away from him and then come up and try to drown him like the sea, force him into an ignominious retreat. Lambert's Castle: he built it high and strong. And now look back at Mapperton: Ralph's land, with stone eagles to guard it and there was nothing the likes of our Tess – or Alec – could do ever to take it away from him. (Oh yes, we've risen up in our time against them: our foremothers were the angry – and long-suffering – wives of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Look over there to the blue line of sky to the east of Mapperton, and if your misty, half-focused eyes can see across land as well as they can dream history and hear the language of the sea, then you'll see the Puddle and Piddle valleys, with their cluster of poor hamlets where the starving labourers prayed for their Napoleon, Captain Swing. Piddlehinton, Puddletown, Briantspuddle. Our foremothers fought and died for land enough to live on – all were deported across the sea to Australia, for their pathetic and brave attempt at revolt.)