Tess (15 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
The answer was, I suppose, that I'd far rather run all the way down the road outside Mapperton and hide in the hollow trunk of the Posy Tree, shelter from an evening of agony, dancing with no one, passed over by Ralph's smoking-jacketed friends and taffeta-ballgowned debutantes, than go in after Tess, past the stone griffins at the gates. I hung back. Tess gave me one of those looks only a younger sister can know, that elder-sister, shrivelling look that sends you back to the nursery, however old you are (and, don't forget, I was only fourteen, to Tess's sixteen). And she walked off! She left me there, by the side of a long, sleek car with a chauffeur inside, who snapped awake when Tess walked off and grinned and winked at me. I ran, in turn â but away from the main entrance, down the slope of the garden, over a hedge that tore my stockings â and then, there I was, down in the gunwales of the great house, in the courtyard, like a prison courtyard that opened out onto a sheer drop of grass.
There must be something about me that asks to serve â or there was then, perhaps â because I was no sooner in the first door leading off that courtyard than a tray laden with goodies: smoked salmon twisted in little rolls, glazed pastries, fake caviar, like the jet beads our mother's mother used to wear, piled on boats fashioned as miniature swans and gleaming under tiny wedges of lemon, was in the act of being carried at breakneck speed by a young waiter to the door of the Great Hall and handed over to me without so much as a by-your-leave. No one questioned my dress, hardly a maid's uniform with apron, clearly a âyoung girl's dress' bought for the occasion, scoop-necked, embarrassingly tight around the bust, three-quarter length and coming down to show a stretch of leg and white satin pumps already stained green from the night field. Yet I was a servant. It was as simple as that. The head chef shouted at me to get a move on â and I did, as if I'd been brought into the
world to take orders. A passing waiter held the great, iron-studded door open for me and I went through, carrying the tray of food just under chin-level. Without a flicker of surprise, guests started to help themselves, talking across me as if I had no meaning other than as tray-bearer, replenisher of the Oxford appetites of young Sir Ralph's friends.
It didn't take me long to spot Tess. I must say that if I appeared a born maid, obedient, subservient, invisible, then Tess seemed a queen that night. For all the darkness of her looks, and the dazzling fairness of most of the young women (after discarding their animal-skin coats they showed very white, puffed-up breasts, held high by whalebone wiring infinitely more sophisticated than anything the little shop in Weymouth could produce) â Tess was as immediately and wordlessly recognized as the giver of orders, the decider of the action of the party, as I was seen as a waitress, a temporary hired help.
Tess's short black dress stood out in that hall, where people milled and jostled and called out in high, meaningless phrases the latest piece of foolishness that came into their heads. Tess stood there with her dark, near-black hair tumbling down to the neck of the simple black dress and a solid wall of young men stood round her. Some were in hunting jackets, I remember â and there was a sad, over-excited stench in that hall where the Morgans of three or four hundred years looked down in their ruffs or velvets: it was a stench I'd come to know when the hunt came over our land, our little piece of garden at the Mill, clattering over stones in the brown water, flattening Mary's favourite magnolia tree that came out early each year and made her think, when her madness was growing inside her, that she was the Madonna, with the magnolia-white skin.
It was the stench of the need to overpower, to kill, to pursue that I recognized, trapped as I was there with my tray of ancestral silver jutting out from just below my face, cutting me off from any possibility of joining the party or getting near to Tess. She was cornered. They bayed at her â and Ralph called for another tray of champagne. They caught my eye and I was sent for it. And what could
I do but go â signalling as I went to Tess, whose faintly flushed face showed she'd had too much already, signalling that she should wait for me, she wasn't to go off and leave me alone here, waiting on the toffs until my feet fell off. Surely I deserved some fun?
And Tess did see me, she did wave at me â though as soon as she raised her arm a bundle of young masters of hounds grabbed it, made fun as if they were going to jive with it, to bring Tess whirling, falling ⦠down.
â Come back! she mouthed over the crowd at me.
Ralph saw me, his forehead creased. I could see him ask Tess if that wasn't Liza-Lu, the little sister ⦠likes handing round the drink and food, eh? Good for her.
Ralph, in his dark wine velvet smoking jacket, with a face so handsome and so stupid it could have belonged to a ventriloquist's doll, stared baffled at me across the sea of people. His blue eyes were blocked out by a tall, old man with white whiskers, who could have been asleep upstairs in the famous Mapperton library for a few centuries and strolled down to join the party. And when the old man had passed I was halfway through the big door to the kitchens, to fetch the champagne ⦠and Ralph was no longer to be seen. But who could blame me for failing to fight my way back there and then and grab hold of my sister, stop her in the course of the night that changed her destiny? Not I ⦠I can't blame myself: I had the wine to fetch for Master Ralph. I was only doing what I was told. Though something else half-told me that when I came back, struggling with the little shallow glasses filled with sparkling wine the more stuck-up young guests twirled in the glass with gold swizzle sticks, so the bubbles went flat ⦠they laughed and swilled it down and bayed for more â something at least whispered to me, as I say, that I wouldn't find Tess and Ralph there, when I came back, at all.
I don't know who was the most to blame, Alec Field, or Ralph Morgan, with his fancy waistcoat, gold filigree on plum satin that made him look twice the age he was; or me, for letting things get
so wildly out of control that night. After all, I was the first to see Alec, hiding there in the pantry where Sir Joseph's gamekeeper hung the game â coming up against him suddenly when the cook sent me in (the deepfreeze was in there too) for a side of the salmon caught by Ralph on the Scottish estates and smoked on oak chips in preparation for the glorious twenty-firster. I could have yelled out â and Alec could have been marched from the great stone pantries and cellars and out across the cobbles of the courtyard, on to the north-facing drop of Mapperton and away down the drive before anyone was any the wiser for it. But I didn't. I came right up against a furry, still-warm thing â a rabbit or a brace of hares, I don't know â and I choked my scream on its flank, with Alec's face staring at me not two inches away and with a kind of mad glee in his eyes. I coughed, and I spluttered ⦠and âHurry, girl!' came from the kitchen before I could think, and âWhat's keeping her, in the name of God?' from an Irish footman who'd had it in for me all evening. (Yes, that was how quickly they'd assumed I was the servant girl, even if my sister was on the brink of becoming the Lady of Mapperton. And don't tell me that social manners had changed and a new freedom for the erstwhile âlower' classes was in operation by then. Because it wasn't â and it isn't now, and it never will be. So you'd better look sharp to your own future, my poor baby.)
Well, I stumbled to the deepfreeze and pulled out the hard, pink side of salmon, and all the while Alec was laughing in a nasty, snickering kind of way that reminded me of those games he made us play on Chesil Beach when we were no more than little children. He was rolling an Old Holborn too â I'll never forget to my dying day the horrible acrid smell of the tobacco and the beating of my own heart at the knowledge that I must warn Tess somehow â warn Tess to escape before it was too late. Instead, as I say, I did nothing. I stood there with that stiff board of a rich man's fish in my hand as if I'd gone deepfrozen too and there was no use in thinking of thawing me.
â Well, well, Liza-Lu, says Alec. After all these years! Now â and he leant right forward so the vile tobacco was puffed right in my eyes â you'll take me to the garage, won't you, love?
â The garage? I knew Alec worked in the Beaminster garage, at the foot of the hill, on the road that winds in so sharply, still as narrow and sad as the day the first Tess was sent down it by her maker Thomas Hardy to search in vain for the love she had lost. I knew Alec worked there; selling Polos and Mars bars and inflatable balls to the kids in summer when they stopped there on the way to West Bay, the great shingle beach that shows sand only at lowest tide. Alec was a mechanic, otherwise: it was said that he was good with his hands; he liked to lie under a car all day, radio playing, his view of feet, or of the vicar's gown as he made his way to the church of St Mary for Evensong. But Alec was up here now. Why should I be expected to take him back down there? And how could I, a fourteen-year-old girl, do so anyway?
â He must have told you where it is, Alec jeered. C'mon, Liza-Lu!
Of course, I suddenly knew what he meant. Ralph Morgan's white E-type was famous in the neighbourhood. Alec would go home quietly if he was allowed a look at the car. And I
did
know where it was kept â or where it âlived', as you might say, so much greater a character than most ordinary people on the estate did that white, streamlined wonder possess. I'd been taken on a ride in the Jag, as Ralph fondly called it, perched in the back with Tess's dark hair streaming out in front of me. I'd come all the way back to Mapperton and felt the intense satisfaction Ralph had known when guiding the gleaming white thighs and black hot nose of his car into the garage. And the garage was only a few steps away! The other side of the courtyard! No one need ever know â I'd plop the salmon in the kitchen, excuse myself and climb with Alec out the scullery window and over the cobbles, in the dark. I nodded at Alec, and thus sealed all of our fates.
You may ask me, did Tess still have a fondness for Alec, after the time we were all found in the attic at the Mill, and Tess fell into a kind of apathy, broken by rebellious acts, that made up the extent of the punishment her father and the world visited upon her?
I would say the answer is no. We played games when we were young; the illicit sex with Alec had been as much of a game as the
stones on Chesil Beach â and when the games were over she never thought more of him. (I still don't know if this is entirely true, but Tess certainly never gave away to me, in those years we were at the Mill, those nights we sat with damp hair in heated rollers, sitting and smoking and turning the pages of the women's magazines that told us how to âget' an eligible young man like Ralph, or a film star, or Adam Faith, that she had regressed about Alec; that she still wanted to see him.)
The tragedy, I suppose, was that Alec didn't feel that way at all.
The car travelled with a low roar. It ate the sides of hedges in lanes that were no more than lost needles, trails of silver-grey in a tangle of late summer hay and over-green leaf; it grazed the tiny grassy islands that stand for roundabouts in the Marshwood Vale. Powerful headlights brought a dance of moths and night creatures, caught fatally in the glare. A strong wind, made by the speed at which we raced, banked and accelerated as soon as a small stretch of straight road showed itself, stung our faces and lifted hair like a drawing of a child confronted by the supernatural. And the first drops of rain came straight down on us â for the Jag never had a hood up, not if young Ralph could help it, that is.
I looked from time to time at the floor by the back seat (a space so small and cramped that both of Ralph's golden Labradors couldn't fit in together). I looked down at the bundle, covered with an old oilskin (Ralph went out fishing from time to time, from West Bay; our mother would laugh at the small catch he brought back, the line of mackerel she said would bring him in less than half the cost of fuel for the boat he rented from old Dowle), and I prayed, against the stinging wind and the spatters of rain that jumped into my eyes and rolled down my cheeks as if I were crying already for the crime that was about to be committed, I prayed the oilskin would never move, that we would come back from our joy-ride and park the car in the stables and no one would be any the wiser.
Of course, the oilskin hid Alec. He'd been crawling about under
the car when Ralph and Tess appeared â just like that â and for a moment we all heard the music in the house, and (a door must have been left open) we saw light from the chandeliers and young girls in misty balldresses strolling out to take the night air with their escorts, most of them half-drunk. Ralph was saying to Tess that a ride would be fun â âup to your part of the world' â he was teasing her, I know, for our mother's life in the dairy land, as a child, of Marshwood: her life as a humble farmgirl, milking cows on the big Bowditch estate. Tess always bridled up when he did this. But he leant towards her â they kissed â he said they might even leave the âbloody party' for an hour or two and go to that stupid nightclub on the road out of Bridport.
By this time Alec had crawled into the back seat of the Jag and sunk down on the floor. I stepped forward (why did I always seem to be spying on my elder sister? Is it part of being the younger that you always think you are?) and Ralph saw me first. He was surprised, then seemed to take my presence there quite for granted.
â Liza-Lu can come along too, Ralph said. He had a kind of patrician kindness, I have to hand him that: like one of those lords or landowners who're accustomed to have a court round them at all times, whether a cluster of gamekeepers, beaters, estate workers or whatever â so the actual wooing of a prospective wife is a pretty public affair. There's no mean desire for privacy with those people, you can say that at least.
Before I knew what was happening, Ralph had opened the door of the car and I was pushing my way past the thick black leather seats into the little ledge at the rear. I even stepped on Alec â it was impossible not to â but the oilskin bundle made no grunt or move. Tess, who'd thrown me rather an odd look at first, now seemed perfectly happy with the arrangement and climbed in next to Ralph. And with a terrible roar we were off.