Tess (6 page)

Tess's position is unmistakable, particularly just now as she looks out from her safe saddle in the tree and tells us just when she'll be ready to go to Charmouth. We wait, looking up, our mouths open. We will do exactly as Tess tells us to do. In all our games, Tess is Queen and we are her train-bearers, slaves and messengers. Up in the ash, Tess is unassailable.

So how, how did the Queen come to fall out of the tree?

When she seemed about to fly into the skies on her branch? Tess, Queen of both Night and Day.

– I'll catch you up, Tess says. I want a cone with that raspberry stuff.

Now Charmouth is a long way off. We all know we have no chance at all of getting there on foot, and that Tess is the only one with the know-how to hitch us a lift once we're on the main coast road from Abbotsbury to Lyme. The rest of us are too young: we'd just get thrown back at our parents like a catch of sprats. Tess has authority: once she flagged down a whole army convoy and the soldiers laughed and whistled as we climbed aboard. (This, needless to say, is strictly forbidden too.)

– Come on, Tess, Retty Priddle says. Please!

Tess moves regally in the tree, settling herself with apple and book as if she had all day to make up her mind. We see her in the lacing of the branches, as if she grew in the ash herself, and could never be detached from it. In our short silence we hear the little stream as it runs, a few feet away, along the boundary of the garden and the steep green hill. Somehow, the stream seems to belong to
Tess as well, and she to it, as if its noisy clatter could be stopped every time she waved her wand cut from the willow on its bank.

We all believed in that kind of thing. And our mother believed in magic, too, but she was too far ahead of her time – or rather, she had the courage to try and return to her own true time – and she paid a heavy price for it.

So this is the story of the day of the tree and the water and the mother and the daughter – and if we had learnt from it then we might not have ended up, as my father inevitably put it, in the pickle we're in today.

Now we are all turning anxiously in the direction of Alec. He, again, is the only one of us of an age and stature to be able to thumb a ride along that interminable straight road that goes past West Bay and the end of Chesil Beach and on to the soft sands of Charmouth
and Lyme Regis. Without him, the prospect of the ice-cream cone with that new, bright, artificial raspberry splash, as hallucinogenic in its desirability as the fruits of Goblin Market, will never be ours. Already dreading the soft drip of the bottled liquid down the side of the cone and onto my hand while – as Tess told me to – I count my change properly this time, and don't eat a mouthful until I've done so – I am still near to tears at the thought that our forbidden journey may be called off.

For Alec, despite the fact of Tess dropping to the ground from the ash tree and strolling over to him as if she and only she had the right to approach him at all, is apparently pretty cool on the idea of going to Charmouth. He says he'd rather go fishing.

It's Alec – who's the one Tess really likes, we all know; she just takes Victor over when she feels like it to keep poor Retty in her place – who mentioned, just casually and before we have time to hear him properly, that there's a funfair at West Bay.

– What? What? Retty and Maud circle the bigger boys.

With the exception of Tess, who was taken on a big dipper when I was too young to go, none of us has any clear idea of what a funfair can be.

But it sounds like everything we are looking for. And we know, without having to be particularly clever, that our mother and father wouldn't like the idea of us going there. So, when our mother comes out onto the flagged terrace that shows the top of the fig tree and houses the tubs of winter-flowering plants and herbs she keeps shielded from the southwesterly gales, we move, again in silent accord, into a pretend game of hopscotch.

– I'm going to the shops. You all stay here playing.

If we'd listened, we'd have guessed that our mother – mine and Tess's, that is – wasn't convinced at all that we'd stay there playing.

And we should have guessed that if she'd been really worried about us, she wouldn't have chosen that moment to say she was going to the shops. At the very least, she'd have popped over to Retty's mother and asked her to keep an eye on us while she was away.

We should have guessed that our mother's hardly seeming to care at all was the first sign of an illness described as such because
at that time there was no place or freedom for such as our mother in the world.

But here we are, hopping and skipping and jumping. To make the game a little more interesting, we're jumping the stream. Retty gets her feet wet, of course. But even at its deepest, the stream never gets dangerously deep in our garden. It has to fall down the sides of the steep incline at the far end of the terrace before it reaches and supplies the millpond, and there it gets really deep. That part's fenced off, right along the terrace from the upper branches of the fig tree to the first alders and pines of the little copse on the near side of the hill. You'd have to be a grown-up to get over a fence that high and fall, fall into the whirling water below.

Here you must leave us for a while, on the road to Oz: it's 1958 and eleven-year-old Tess is strutting along just a few paces ahead as she always does, pigeon chest stuck out, the top of her Aertex vest showing above the collar of the ‘little-girl' gingham dress.

Liza-Lu – two years younger and destined to stay that way until Tess becomes a non-person, that is, a woman suspected of murder, and then Liza-Lu becomes respectable, the elder of the two – Liza-Lu is humming to herself and making up stories as she goes along. (No one looks at Liza-Lu, not even the man she eventually marries, who was meant for Tess, and she is forced to look at the world instead, and make up stories about it.)

Maudie, also nine years old and with a squint that makes people say she's taking after her father, she'll come to no good: didn't she take a Mars bar from old Mrs Bailey's shop only last week and the old lady was too kind to report her? But watch out next time! And that pigtail … you could see a bird's nest in there if you looked closer. But Maudie doesn't care. In her mind's eye is candyfloss, a
great magic spun ball of sweet heaven, like they eat in the pictures you can see in the one-and-ninepennies at the Bridport Majestic for nothing if the usherette happens to think she's seen a mouse scurrying across the foyer floor …

Victor. Nearly as tall – and as old – as Alec. That is, about twelve years of age and as swarthy as his sister. They're gypsies, there's no harm in them, our mother says when neighbours complain of the Charmouth caravan people and say they're missing money from the drawers of Welsh dressers, they can't leave the back door open like they used to. And wasn't one of the Nasebury girls nearly pulled off the road and into a lane by one of the Charmouth campers?

Alec. Walking in the middle of the road just as it curves round at its most dangerous, jumps out of the way when the cars come. (Tess can beat him at playing chicken but she wouldn't dream of it while we're still in view of the Mill. Our swan-loving father, when it comes to punishing his daughters for some peccadillo, thinks nothing of administering a good beating, or, worst of all for the communicative, gregarious Tess, a whole day of solitary confinement.) So Alec, taller than Victor, blond-haired but with the greasy blond turning already to that sleek Brylcreemed look all the boys hanker after – a satiny quiff, a face like Elvis's on the record covers – swerves alone in the empty country road, desperate to create a drama of the Midwest or urban wastelands of a longed-for, distant America. (He'll get there one day. But by then, without knowing it, he truly is a marked man.)

Retty Priddle. Oh, Retty! How can you forgive me? You're the only one of us, on that brick road to the West Bay funfair, who actually has some thought for others. You're eleven years old and you're holding my hand on one side and Maudie's on the other in case a big lorry comes too close and we cry out, frightened. When Maudie's sandal comes undone – it would; those shoes, as our Nasebury good neighbours would say, are rightly a disgrace – you're the one who calls for everyone to stop and wait unless she gets left behind.

Retty, who knew how to love, and fell in love with the wrong man, a man who was himself marked out for an extraordinary fate: lover of a murderess, prophet of a new age disgraced. Poor Retty,
who drowned for her love. But I will make it up to you, Retty, for all the unhappiness you suffered. I will tell Ella and Tess's baby granddaughter all there is to know.

I see Ella now as she runs in the fast, end-September dusk between our houses, eager already to get away from the lessons of the past. Ella, who must go to school and yet refuses to. Who asks, why should I learn this history and maths and English, Liza-Lu? It's so
boring
. And to whom I must teach the Living History; and the Maths that will make a different equation of the world; and English as it first came out of the mouths of women, as they passed their secrets – precisely – by word of mouth.

In the beginning of our lesson, Ella–

For here you are now, holding up a book at me, frowning at the task your mother has set for you.

– Mum says can you go into Dorchester for her tomorrow and get some more of these?

As we go into the Mill, Ella holds out the guidebook. In the kiosk by the swannery where her mother sits all day, selling postcards, and lobelias in pots from the tropical gardens, and entrance tickets, these guides go like hot cakes. And this year, for no reason that anyone can give, the swannery will be open beyond the equinox, right to the end of October. (Putting profit before safety, say the Nasebury folk; when the seas come up and threaten to spill over Chesil Beach at the time of the autumn gales, children have been known to get trapped on the high ridge of shingle and, every few years, one drowns. So the enclosure is securely locked and the birds left to their migration across the Fleet in private. Not this year, though. Tourism, the Heritage business, is big business in west Dorset these days, and the late sun brings coachloads to see the wooden pens abutting the Fleet, and to catch a glimpse of the swanherd, in his post held down the generations for over six hundred years at Abbotsbury Swannery.)

I almost tell Ella that it's not worth giving visitors the guidebooks they put out. For if anything's an example of dead history, it's what
they write. But there's no sense in upsetting her poor mother; and I say I will. (If I can, I add under my breath. If I'm still here. But I must still be here, to tell the tale.)

And, as Ella goes up to take Baby Tess arid lay her down in her cot – and as she looks round the familiar room and adds the new baby – miraculously arrived as she had always somehow known they did – to the faded old sofa by the fire, and the kitchen table at the far end by the door out into the night garden, the table laid with a lino cloth and a fresh egg for her tea – and as she looks round the long room again, with its low beams and its collection of bric-à-brac and flotsam that no one moved away when one after another my parents departed, I see her begin to try and make sense of history.

She sees my parents' history: the piece of driftwood that looks like a leg broken off at the knee, or an arm and fist, so gnarled and veined it could be painted by Dürer – it lies on the sill and my father brought it in one day; it was washed up on Chesil Bank and for some reason it caught his fancy.

The lump of stone from the River Brit, in the Marshwood Vale where all your foremothers come from, little Tess, that my mother found and said had gold in it. My father laughed; but when you pour water on it the gold gleams – the stone is as veined as the wood, but with a living ore from millions of years ago. My father's wood is a dead thing.

I see her looking at the quilt my mother made, that was on her bed and is now covering Baby Tess; and I see her frown again, in the effort to understand generation, continuity, the nameless beauty of women's work down the centuries: embroidery, tapestry, patchwork, samplers, homilies, stitches of prayer. She sees, in this room, the labours of my poor mother – as she waited for my father, out to all hours, up to the thighs in waders, on shores dotted with sleeping white birds; and in the quilt she sees the gold my mother wove from her pile of worthless straw.

For the moment, Ella, you're happy as you walk to the table and lift from the brown egg the cosy my mother knitted when she was in hospital having Tess – and she'd gone in in such a hurry she'd picked up the wrong bag of wool and there was only enough for an
egg cosy (a bad omen some of the nurses said). You slice the top off with a knife. You're smiling now – and something in the sudden lifting in the atmosphere makes Baby Tess open her eyes.