Tess (12 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
When he describes the onset of original sin Augustine chooses
political language â and specifically the language of sexual politics. It's not long before he can âprove' that â just as soul and body must co-exist, with the soul in a position of authority â Adam and Eve must have been created to live together in a harmonious order of authority and obedience, superiority and subordination. âWe must conclude', says Augustine, âthat a husband is meant to rule over his wife as the spirit rules the flesh.' But once each member of the primal couple had experienced that first internal revolt in which the bodily passions arose against the soul, they experienced analogous disruption in their relationship with one another. Although originally created equal with man in regard to her rational soul, woman's formation from Adam's rib established her as âthe weaker part of the human couple'. Being closely connected with bodily passion, woman, although created to be man's helper, became his temptress and led him into disaster. The Genesis account describes the result: God himself reinforced the husband's authority over his wife, placing divine sanction upon the social, legal and economic machinery of male domination.
This, Baby Tess â as we walk into the church of St Mary at Beaminster and stand by the (Norman) font, thrown out in a period of restoration in 1863 (when Thomas Hardy was twenty-three years old) and found in a stonemason's yard in 1927 â this, my poor child, is the litany of the sins into which you have been born.
This is the song that came, louder each year, across Europe: the sad, monotonous chant of the monks, the song of punishment and blame.
As luck would have it, the day Alec and Tess were caught in the room with the round eye was the day our mother came home. She'd been âvisiting friends', I said â and so we all pretended to believe at the time: after all, we knew our mother's family was from the âother side' of Bridport, and we knew there were cousins in Whitchurch Canonicorum, with a cider orchard and geese besides. We knew our mother's elder brother â who she said she never liked much but she felt sorry for his poor wife Sally â lived high up in the Marshwood Vale â where she'd grown up too, up above the village called Wootton Fitzpaine, nearly up at Lambert's Castle
where you could look out over the whole of west Dorset to the sea. We pretended that was what our mother had done. She'd felt like a change â that was how Mrs Priddle put it, when she âcame in' with a face as sour as a crab apple, to fix our father's shirts and socks, and put breakfast on the table for us too, drag a comb through Tess's dark, thick, knotty hair in the struggle to get us to school.
We knew really that our mother hadn't been well since the day we went to the funfair and Tess lost her nerve â at just about the same time as our mother Mary lost her wits, you could say. We sensed that the tall, grim building on the road out of Bridport towards Charmouth was where she'd been taken, to have the voices drummed out of her â or shocked by lightning streaks that would judder her whole body â or simply numbed by poisons she (and her female ancestors) would never have concocted, even for the deadliest enemy. There was nothing we could do about it â except hear her plaintive voice in the water of the millrace at night, begging us, her daughters, to come and set her free. We didn't know how to act against authority then; and if we did, it was, as in the case of Tess, with whole-hearted selfishness. As if the race, with the decline of our mother, must be propagated as soon as physically possible: as soon as Tess bled, her body took action to multiply and bring forth. It was brutal; we couldn't help knowing what went on even though we could never admit it to each other. We let our mother and her warning voices fade away from our memory, and the urgency of the present and the future took us over. We played truant from school, we hung about on the corner in Weymouth where the ships come in by the harbour front, and the tarts and the dope dealers stand bunched and lonely at the same time: outcasts thrown together, dregs brought in on the oily scum of the port. Tess picked up a Russian sailor, and then ran away from him when he'd taken a room at the Bellevue down the other end of Weymouth, by the pier. Egged on by Maud and Victor, I took a job behind the bar at the posh hotel built and named after mad King George, who liked to come down to Weymouth and lower his trembling extremities into the sea. I said I was eighteen (couldn't possibly have been) and they overlooked the lie to get an extra hand with pouring gins and tonics, bending low with tits hardly bigger
than a pair of nuts, eyed greedily by the men down from Birmingham. Once we decided to go away to London â after all, what would our father care? â and we took the little train from Weymouth to Westbury â but Fred Henchard, with the bristling moustache and the dairy acres down at Kimmeridge, Fred who used to call at the Mill and ask if he could have a pair of swans for the new ornamental lake he was building (he was always told No, they were the property of the monarch, and we used to joke old Fred Henchard'd go to the Tower if he slipped up the Fleet one night and pinched them) â he saw us on Westbury station and asked ever-so-strict what we thought we were doing there, on a weekday in term. Fred Henchard was a magistrate, a JP, and we went back meek as mice with him in the stuffy little van that smelt of toffee papers and cattle mix. He dropped us at the school and we said nothing: his look told us that he wouldn't either, if we behaved ourselves. But we couldn't for long, of course. Alec was waiting â like a shabby, hand-me-down piece of our destiny, that's the way I see it now. I know we couldn't duck out of it â we'd heard Mrs Priddle say girls without a mother didn't stand a chance of staying on the straight and narrow â only our father, oblivious to everything except the nesting habit of the rare Abbotsbury swans, had to have a scene pushed up right under his eyes to believe it was happening at all.
For days after she was brought back, our mother was as silent and white as a ghost â that's what we heard Mrs Priddle say, who stopped letting Retty in to play with us; she was afraid something was going to happen. Of course I realize with hindsight that she wouldn't want her daughter involved in our mother's second suicide attempt â but it was hurtful at the time. Our mother's return made us pariahs again. The school gave us afternoons off, âto help at home'. We felt more trapped and unhappy than ever, at that time â and I really don't think we gave a damn what happened to our mother then. We'd been so much freer when she was shut up, you see!
What did happen, though, was â as so often happens â just the opposite of what we secretly dreaded and everyone else openly expected. Our mother came down to breakfast one chilly winter morning â about five weeks or so since Tess had been locked up
for trying to fly, with Alec between her legs like a witch's broomstick (that's how little Maud drew the scene, at school, and the visiting art teacher scrumpled up the paper with its crude, Saxon-looking representation of Alec's big penis and Tess's grinning face, stick legs gripping his shoulders â and threw it away in the bin, which is how we all came to see it later, of course, crowding round Maud as she proudly smoothed it out). Our mother Mary told us she had decided to go and live on her own. She was leaving our father. She had a friend down at Langton Herring, a village down the far end of Chesil Beach with a smugglers' inn and an old whitewashed house where her friend Betsy Dowle of the fishing fleet folk did B & B. âAnd that's where I'll be working,' our mother announced to us, plain as that. âI'll be looking after the fishery side.'
I remember it was a dark, end-of-the-world-feeling morning because as soon as she spoke, our father John Hewitt turned on the light in the kitchen â I suppose we'd all been sitting in the gloom for so long, since the âdisgrace' of Tess, at least, that we'd come to take dark for granted â and for the first time for what seemed like years I took a good look at my mother's face. And I felt proud and afraid, together.
Mary's face had become the face of a martyr â or an ascetic â a face that was lined with suffering and had grown longer, more thin-nosed, more pensive: you thought of the faces on the old Celtic crosses, or on Anglo-Saxon tombs, where Mary Magdalene, kneeling submissive but full of joy, wipes the feet of Our Lord with her hair. You glimpsed only intermittently now the old pagan features, the eye with a glint, the lips that muttered runes and magic, the full-shaped arms that pulled down thick brambles to get at hanging mistletoe, healing vervain. The lineaments of pain, an ecstasy in self-abasement, denial of earthly pleasure, were strong in that face, and had converted it from madwoman to votary. But the voice of self-determination fitted the new face, the Saxon, free-woman face Mary Hewitt now presented to the world. Like her ancestors in the female line before her, Mary would prosper with her own stall selling the fish the Dowles' boats brought in, rough or calm. She would serve all-comers, and in all weathers, when the
men went home to wives and wet oilskins drying in the front room. After a while she'd have her own shop, in Bridport where her mother and grandmothers had lived and worked the hemp for nets for the fishing; later still she'd employ a staff, a young man with a van who'd supply all the posh new hotels along the coast and inland as far as Evershot. Crab; mussels; red mullet caught in Devon along with lobsters; Lyme Bay plaice that melted in the mouth, you didn't need the batter. Mary would be independent, financially and emotionally. But it took all of us a long time to take that in.
â So how long are you planning to stay? John said.
Silence fell. I looked next at Tess, deep in her obscure punishment, retribution for her sin being the slow, painful regaining of our father's trust and affection. This was worse than chains and whipping: how could she know when the father, the lord, the head of the family, would consider her sentence done, her forgiveness complete? Standing in for the Christian deity, might he decide to withhold grace from the fornicating woman until such time as she offered her whole life to him, serving him as nuns serve God in a nunnery, dedicating every moment of her life to his comfort and happiness? It was possible: look at Lily Tither down at Rodden, who'd been caught with the young lord of the manor, the heir to red-walled, yew-planted Parnham â no, there was no shotgun wedding, not to young Master Thomas, anyway; more a wedding to old Frank, her father, a giving, like a bride of Christ, a celibate union that was nonetheless to the death and far beyond. Lily's get-thee-to-a-nunnery was a marching order to Tesco's every day except Sunday, to buy the pilchards and the toilet paper and all the other needs of old Frank Tither; her stations of the Cross were Monday washday, Wednesday baking, Saturday Women's Institute with other daughters and wives of the parish. And as the years shrivelled, and she counted them out like pips or plum stones on the side of the plate â no tinker husband, no tailor, not even a beggarman or thief to take between the sheets, so Lily turned yellow and sere herself, her menopause taking her suddenly and bringing fits of weeping like winter storms. And a fat lot her lord and master, the head of the family as Christ is the Head of the Church, cared for that.
Things would be different now, of course: it was 1961, wasn't it, and there was the Pill, and the technology we were all promised, and a future where the wasted, sacrificed life of Lily Tither wouldn't be possible. Or so we thought. But it was hard, watching Tess as she shrank at our father's step, turned to smile at him where once she had been so high-handed, went for milk down to Mrs Warren and asked for all the best brown eggs from her too â her dad did like a brown egg for breakfast â it was hard to watch the frown she received in return, the high-domed head hidden by a newspaper when Tess tried to speak, the heavy, dank smell of disapproval at the Mill. Could Tess, at fourteen, really hope to escape from the generations of moral superiority on the part of her forefathers, the centuries of chastisement (of which the most cruel-minded disciple, Thomas Hardy, was the most delicate practitioner)? Of course she couldn't. We were foolish enough to believe in instant change as reported by shallow-minded journalists: first wave of liberation with the new music, first rash of birth-control clinics promising a return to Celtic freedom and power, Saxon independence, property-owning and business for women. We believed it, so we suffered more at the ache of the old pains, the bonds of love and tenderness we had felt for a distant, patriarchal father who nevertheless told us he had always loved and cared for us. As for our mother â it's only now that I can see the courage with which she confronted her husband. It's only now that I see a woman, driven mad by the constrictions of her life and âput away' for the crime of trying to point out the connections and correspondences between every living and inanimate thing on the globe â face up to her legal wedded spouse and say, penniless as she was, that she wanted no maintenance for herself and her children, thank you, because she was going off on her own, to make a living on the hard shingle at West Bay, where the sea spray in winter comes in in white lumps the size of snowballs and your hands get red raw handling frozen cod as it's thrown in off the trawler.
I see it now. But then I simply felt abandoned. And Tess, perhaps sensing that she would have to fill some gap â that her most severe punishment would be to stand as wife to this strange, reserved and
probably bitter man â made her new womanly face at our father and asked if he'd like a fresh cup of tea.
â It's not a question of how long I'm planning to stay, Mary said in reply to her husband John's question, I'm going for good.
â For good, John repeated, as if he had no idea what the words meant. He cleared his throat, picked up the newspaper, glanced at the tide table and rose, assuming a practical, businesslike air.
We all watched our father as he went to the door of the kitchen, pulled at his oilskin â which fell to the floor, bringing a clutter of Mary's old hats down with it. John left them there â almost with jubilation. The hats, big, floppy things Mary used to paint in in the days she did water-colours and showed them at the village show, were like dusty haloes, straw collapsing and fraying as the years passed. Our father shrugged on the bright yellow waterproof and left for the swannery.