Tess (27 page)

And all the while the violence of Gabriel's silence, which said:

I never promised you a rose garden.

You never told me you had a kid.

What could we do with a kid in tow when I'm gonna travel, play my guitar round the world?

She'd be better off staying here with you, love.

And where were we, Tess and I? Oh, quite simple: sleeping in the forecourt of the manor in the dusty trailer, with two lurchers and
two greyhounds for company. But not sleeping, really. Watching the grey dawn as it brought the first wisps of the fog with it, shivering in the clammy cold of the caravan. It's in dismal, all-too-recognizable circumstances like these that the old story is played out.

Even the Thermos was broken, I remember that. Tess wept as the inner lining snapped and cut her hand as she tried to wrench the top off.

We both knew Gabriel and Retty were up there. We knew Gabriel's love for Tess couldn't include a child.

So, when you come down to it, what's new?

To top it all, when we got back to the Mill, little Mary had come down with chickenpox and our mother was grim as one of the Fates you see on an Ancient Greek vase – dabbing the poor little creature's face with chamomile and staring at the bedraggled, furious Tess as if she was something the cat brought in.

After I'd made a cup of tea our mother Mary sat across the kitchen table from us. A swan – then a formation of swans – flew noisily overhead. We all thought of winter coming on and John Hewitt sitting like a mad hermit in the freezing swanhouse by the edge of the lagoon. Then our mother said something that turned the story on one more cog, so we sat staring at each other in that terrible silence again – until the child started her feverish crying.

– Alec Field is back, she said. Mrs Moores saw him in Bridport today. He was wearing a double-breasted suit. First thing, she thought he was an American.

Fog.

The whole of that week the white sea-mist, famous in west Dorset for wrecking ships, for setting farm labourers on the wrong path as they make their way home from turnip-hoeing over the hills – the fog known right across the county for the vile phlegm that
the spit-coloured vapour brought, killing off the old and infirm, choking the lungs of newborn babies so they turn to the pillow and suffocate in a further expanse of stifling white –

The sea fog came in that week of Gabriel's silence and Tess's despair, and there had never been a summer, so folk round about said, with anything so evil, so persistent, so murderous, as that fog.

Come closer, little Ella, and I'll sing out the rest of the ballad to you. It's a sad one – and it's for you and the infant Tess here to make sure it can never be sung here again – or anywhere else, for that matter. Up to you to see that life's tape is changed, time for a new tune.

And especially in memory of poor Retty, who ran to the beach – just out there, where the stones are big as goose eggs (and the fishermen know where they've landed, even in a pea-souper, by the size of those fat great stones).

Gabriel has gone off with the band. They'll be at Portsmouth by now. A tour of France and Germany and then the big snub-nosed plane to the United States of America! There'll be plenty of girls like you, Retty, in the United States of America!

Retty loads her pockets and stands completely muffled by the mist, which licks her face and wraps her in cotton wool as if she's something too precious to lose. Why go down there to the sea with the racing current, and lie down on the sea-bed, only to rise when the sea sucks the stones from your pockets and the corpse bloats and goes dancing out to the Race?

Don't do it, Retty! There are plenty better than Gabriel about.

But Retty is in love. Tears roll down her healthy country girl's cheeks. She wades in … she pauses … with a shriek she rushes on forward, and she drowns.

The afternoon cockcrow had been unlucky, after all. Tess, betrayed by Retty, sees the body the fishermen bring into the cottage – yes, to that cottage next to where you live, over there, Ella – Tess sees the body with a sense of almost total detachment, as if the fog
had killed her feelings for her old friend and she was staring at a hollow-eyed, dripping-dead stranger.

Tess is unhappy. Tess is in love and she wants Gabriel back. Never mind that Gabriel is on his way to the United States of America – and crossing his path is Alec, on his way back – never mind that she has a child and she should know better – Tess wants Gabriel back.

Mother Hum tells her what to do:

Pick three rosebuds at dawn
. (The fog makes the buds clammy and cold and Tess pricks her finger and sobs.)

Place one rosebud under a yew
. (Easy. Tess goes to the church in Beaminster – she has to visit an old friend of our mother there anyway, has to pay a visit with her little daughter: life has to appear to go on, even when you're broken-hearted.) Tess goes into St Mary's churchyard. She stands by the wall of the cottage where Gertrude Bugler was visited by the angel of poetry and then by his indignant ex-muse; and she places the rosebud under a yew tree there as far as possible from the church.

Place one rosebud in a new-made grave
. (Alas, only too easy: poor Retty, buried at Abbotsbury. How can Tess bring herself to creep in the all-concealing fog and feel the soft, new-dug earth with her fingertips, push in the pointed bud?) She can, she's in love and she's ruthless with the need to get Gabriel back to her.

Place one rosebud under your pillow
.

Ella – you hear the knock at the door – and then the second and third knock, the curtain rising on the last act of the melodrama, the sound of the men at the door, fresh from their find in the shallow gravel pit behind the George Hotel at West Bay.

But let them wait a minute.

Close your eyes, Baby Tess, and you, Ella, too. If you try, you can hear the sound of the sea in the shells, down there in the summer of 1954, on Chesil Beach.

You can feel our father's hand on Tess, when she comes running back from the Game of Stones, that Alec and Victor have so naughtily made us play.

You can feel his hand, as it comes down to strike his daughter (he can smell her sex, he must punish her, he must give her a few lashes with the cane that's kept in the dining-room cupboard, along with the bottle of malt whisky he takes a nip from when nesting makes him late and soaking wet at the swannery). He knows, this father of ours, that Tess has been up to no good.

He pulls down her pants … she screams for our mother, but Mary, like in a terrible fairy tale, has gone away … he makes me
watch as he brings the cane down on poor Tess's white flesh, still goosepimply from the pea-gravel at West Bay.

And I still must watch as our father pulls out that great swollen purple thing that looks like the worms he taught us to thread on hooks when he took us fishing at Litton Bredy, and sinks it right into Tess's bottom there as she shrieks and he clamps a hand over her mouth, and I feel the fog swirl right in behind my eyes and fall down on the floor with fog-spots dancing red and white and blue in my brain.

Year after year after year it went on. No, never me. Only Tess. She was Daddy's girl. He couldn't let her out of his sight.

And that's where the silence came from: Tess's silence, as muffling and thick and white as the sea-fog: the silence you could almost hear, when she understood Gabriel would never come back to her. The silence she shared with our mother Mary Hewitt – who must have known of the abuse to her child and colluded with it, while going deeper into madness. When his favourite swan turned sooty-black and ran off with that Alec from the no-good people by the garage, it was already too late.

Tess knew, or half-knew, anyway. On the night of the ball up at Mapperton she was already well gone in pregnancy. No wonder Dr Ryall wouldn't touch her!

Your mother, Baby Tess, has her grandfather as her father. The child was the last love for our father John Hewitt, the next incarnation of his daughter Tess.

But he wasn't going to get away with it as easily as that.

The night the child, little Mary, vanished from her bed … didn't I hear a boat, or something like the fog-muffled outboard engine of a small fishing-boat as I lay awake at the Mill, wondering like so many other lasses, I've no doubt, where and when I could next see the heart-throb Gabriel Bell.

And instead of going to the door and taking the powerful torch our father would carry with him on an emergency trip to an ill or dying bird (he was so tender with the swans, so cruelly tender with Tess, bathing her weals when he had beaten her, ‘kissing her better'
when he had thrust his great cock right into her mouth so she gagged and nearly died of it) … instead of going out to see what kind of boat was on the water becalmed by fog out there, I went on dreaming of Gabriel – and my hand slid between my legs and I dreamed of Tess and Alec in the attic high upstairs, and I dreamed of Gabriel coming towards me, clasping me tight as Alec had done with Tess, all those years ago –

I brought myself to a climax, while the murder – the revenge killing that came years, thousands of years since the first ballad of love, betrayal and revenge was sung through a woman – was carried out. As I twisted and tossed in my narrow bed at the Mill, I never heard our mother as she raced down the stairs and out into the wall of black mist that was the night.

And I'm running past her, down the narrow lane and out onto the expanse of grass, dry and baked from summer, where the kiosk, night-shuttered, makes a dark shadow against the dawn lifting in the sky–

And past the gleam of the white hydrangeas by the entrance to the swannery, where the brook that clatters through our garden at the Mill runs deep and brown, to its outlet into the sea –

Tess has caught me up by now, is clutching at my sleeve.

There, on the ridge of stones that is Chesil Beach, my mother stands …

Our father John Hewitt is in his little hut by the side of the lagoon. It's high summer and the swans are moulting, so the piles of dead feathers that blow around in the light breeze make a whirling screen between us as I run, calling out for Tess's child. The birds, lethargic in the heat, walk ponderously around no-longer-wanted nests of twigs and straw. I dodge them; not one of them even spits at me as I run faster, heroine of a plot that has been taken up and played out so many times the audience is already rustling sweetpapers, clearing throats, planning an afternoon at the sales and then tea.