Tess (16 page)

The car stopped under a clump of pine trees that looked as if they'd been sawn off by the wind, on that high promontory of land that is Lambert's Castle. And we must have looked an odd sight – the Jag at a ninety-degree angle to the land, front bumper up against the trunk of a conifer that released a shower of pine cones onto us, Alec and me thrown sideways out of the car at the back and Tess and
Ralph noticing nothing, lips glued in a kiss. The sky had cleared. A moon that looked as if it too had been sawn in half by an amateur woodsman glinted coldly down at us.

It could all be described as a mistake. If Alec hadn't chosen that moment to grab Ralph's hair from the back and twist his head round – and Ralph, horrified and shouting with pain, hadn't wrenched the car free and jammed his foot down on the accelerator so the Jag shot forward, no lights, only the moon showing in the clear air the precipice that is the wall of Lambert's Castle – and if Tess, twisting in her seat, screaming too, seeing Alec and trying to pound him with her fists – and if the car hadn't gone slam into an oak tree, wrecking itself this time, crumpling metal, a first lick of flame bursting from the engine – then I wouldn't be telling you, Baby Tess, the story of your mother and grandmother's life. It would all be different. You might be at Mapperton Hall today, and going when you're older to the posh girls' school near Shaftesbury, where they wear little blue and white cotton dresses in summer and carry hockey sticks in winter, not allowed to knock holly berries off the trees as they go, like we did as kids. I wouldn't be holding you like this – a refugee baby, wrapped in a shawl and nowhere to go. You'd have a pram, a nanny most likely. But the dice fell another way – just as surely as Alec, who had hurtled from the car at the first impact with the pine tree, had rolled, right to the edge of the cliff, and hung there, gripping the unsettled stones and the unfriendly bracken shoots of that high-up terrain.

Tess was out of the car and running, Ralph behind her. I don't know which one of them saw Alec's head first, peering like a badger's over the side of the cliff – as he desperately edged along, finding a crevice for his poor hands, hiding as much as he could of himself in the gorse and overhanging bracken – but it doesn't matter which of them it was, because Ralph's words, loud and carrying in the thin night air, are as strong in my memory now as they ever have been. ‘God,' Ralph shouted, at Tess maybe, at no one in particular, ‘it's that ghastly little pleb from the garage.'

And, as he walked to the Jag, pulled open the boot and brought out his .22, Ralph said, ‘That's bad.' Then – you could feel the venom that came from his polite, clipped accents: ‘I always think
it's better to shoot vermin straight away and get it over with, don't you, Tess?'

I don't know – and I never will know – whether Ralph would actually have taken a shot at Alec. It may seem incredible even to imagine that he might – that a man could kill another on a quiet Dorset hill in 1963 – but I dare say it could have been passed off as an accident or self-defence or whatever, and with Ralph's word against ours in Bridport County Court I wouldn't like to say for sure we'd have been the ones to be believed.

Anyway, you could say it might have been better if Alec had been shot there and then – like vermin, as Ralph said. Our mother certainly would have thought so. It's hard, when you look back on times like that – when things could have gone one way or the other – to decide what you think in retrospect. It all happened so quickly, you see –

No! A shrill, raucous cry – a swan in the last throes of battle, that was how Tess sounded, her No! No! to the casual, arrogant disposal of Alec by the man in smoking-jacket velvet, the owner of all the acres of Mapperton and the land Alec's garage stood on, too. That cry, that cut a swath between the men, as the gun went higher and Alec dropped down as far as he could go without losing his hold on the stones, made Ralph turn to her for one fatal, electrifying second.

By the time he swung round again, Tess and Alec had both gone.

Don't ask me what I did to help, before Tess made her great leap and took Alec with her, the two of them rolling down, down through pine trees and over leaves and boulders, to safety. I did nothing. Younger sisters so often do just that – they stand and watch and then it's too late. And I don't know whether Ralph knew that Tess and Alec had been lovers. I expect he did – with a girl as beautiful as Tess most of the young landowners in the county would have noticed and asked before she was properly in her teens. No matter. The atmosphere became very strange. It was as if nothing had happened up there at all, on the ramparts of the earthworks that was our mother's territory, her imaginary home passed down through her mother and foremothers since the days of the autocratic king who was refused by the sea.

Nothing had happened at all. Ralph had come for an evening trip to break the tedium of the ball given in his honour; there had been what he would doubtless later describe as ‘a bit of a prang', and he'd gone home again.

Ralph and I walked all the way down from Lambert's Castle to the village of Wootton Fitzpaine and called up from the call box and a family retainer came, in a Range Rover. I was dropped off first. I didn't say good night, and they drove off without waiting to see if I had a key to the Mill – to see if I was safely in, before they went. There was no mention of Tess. She might never have existed.

My father had been waiting up. He stared at me as I walked in alone and then went back to his records of the swannery – he'd often sit up late working out the figures, the numbers of birds, the casualties and the new nest-building sites. I knew somehow he wasn't surprised to see me come in without Tess. He'd known that night when we set off that she'd never come back – the black swan he never could tame or understand.

When Tess next contacted our mother – and myself – she was living (temporarily; she didn't know how temporarily, poor girl) in Alec's uncle's flat in East Coker – and her pregnancy was three months gone.

It's getting late; so late that the first streaks of morning are coming up in the sky over West Bay. There's an odd, grey twilight the colour of the stone facade of St Mary's Church and we pause, Baby Tess, by the gates of the church, on our long way back to the Mill and to the full light of day when the stones in the shallow pit behind the George Hotel at West Bay will finally be shifted and the body will be found.

We look west – to a lightening sky over the sea that stretches to America, where Alec fled and no question of support for Tess or baby. And I'll tell you, when one day you want to know why Tess chose to have that baby – yes, the baby was your mother, Baby Tess – and not go back to the old woman of Langton Herring or to the National Health doctor in Weymouth to plead for a ‘termination'. Our mother lost her freedom when Tess's baby, your mother, was born; but she helped us, our newly strong witch-mother, as best she could.

For our father, of course, it was another matter. Tess had ‘thrown away her life'. Tess had ‘slipped up'. Tess had brought shame on the family. (Yes, in 1963. But our father was born in the last year of Victoria; and even today you'll find that attitude a great deal more prevalent than you might expect.)

Tess's fault. So, as we watch the dawn as it touches the top of St Mary's spire and softens the frowning gargoyles on the porch, I tell you that whatever Tess had chosen to do, it would have been her fault. We are still, whatever the appearances, in the age of Christian punishment, you must remember. If Tess had aborted the baby it would – to many – have been considered a sin, her fault. By deciding to go ahead and have it, she showed her foolish ‘wilfulness' to the world. Her fault. Society, built as it is on patriarchal attitudes that are only just recently beginning to undergo an assault by the oppressed, the pitied, the dispossessed, flinched from Tess just as much in 1963 as it had done a century earlier – the hypocrisies were different, that's all.

Conception. Let me show you, as we watch the sun rise pale and red and turn the world upside down, making an evening glow on the last day of the year (by the Celtic calendar) of the last century of the second millennium since the birth of Christ, let me show you the dark old house that stands by the side of the church and looks out across the valley over the roofs of Beaminster. For it's there that the poetic conception took place that makes up the ballad of Tess. There, Tess was born and reborn, incarnation and reincarnation of the dominating, controlling imagination of the great Thomas Hardy. Come with me – we'll walk to the end of the short drive and look up at the stumpy, largish cottage with the ‘picture'
window that looks out over the quaint Beaminster lanes. You must know the more recent past. You must understand the antecedents of Tess's story. So I'll tell it to you as our mother told it to us at the Mill when we were very young, and Tess was fidgeting with her mug of milk and spilt it on the rag rug so my mother had to stop and go to fetch a cloth to wipe it up. Then she told us again, when we were older; and Tess's dark eyes, vague at first, roaming the room in search of some distraction from the ‘boring' past, grew darker and wider …

As we already know, Thomas Hardy first set eyes on the young woman who was to be the inspiration for Tess when he was on a visit to his mother in 1888. Augusta Way was her name, she was eighteen years old and she worked as a milkmaid on the Kingston Maurward estate. She lived with her family in the old house … Hardy saw her in the fields, bringing in the herd of cows …

Thomas Hardy falls in love with this dark-eyed beauty. He sees in the humble life she leads in a house that has all the remnants of grandeur a reflection of his own (imagined) decline from an important and distinguished family to the obscure and impoverished Hardys that were his father and grandfather. Sweet Augusta, untroubled by thoughts of this kind, smiles at Hardy as he dallies at the gate, pretends to pick a wild rose from the thorny hedge by the side of the field to present to his mother, the aged Jemima, in her cottage at Bockhampton, a short walk away. Hardy sees Augusta's smile and he smiles back at her. Tess – Tess of a grand old family, the D'Urbervilles, now living in humble circumstances, begins to be born.

Hardy conceives Tess, and Augusta Way starts to cease to exist. Already, perhaps, divining that she will be a footnote in history, an appendage of a great man (of whom at this time she has not even heard), she feels for the first time in her life self-conscious. Why does this man with the angry moustache, this man nearing fifty who carries all his neglect of and dislike for his wife in his small, slanting eyes and questioning, arrogant angle of his head, keep smiling at
her? His hands fumble with the latch of the gate, and Augusta turns and flees.

The next time Hardy looks up from the reverie that caught him by the gate with the stile set into the wooden staves of the fence at the side, the stile he could easily have climbed if he had really wanted to come closer to Augusta – to kiss her, perhaps, as could and did happen only too often to milkmaids at haymaking time – Augusta has disappeared and a cloud has come over the sun. The cows that belong to the Kingston Maurward land stare at him before ambling away. Hardy lets the wild rose, crumpled and faded already, drop from his fingers to the ground. He needn't look in on his mother, after all, on the way back to Max Gate. He's in a hurry – although as yet he hardly knows why.

By the time Hardy has arrived at Max Gate, his ugly house high in the hills above Dorchester, and walked past the dismal smell of boiled cabbage and mutton in the hall (Emma is a terrible housekeeper), his wife has the most formidable rival of her life. (Indeed, after she has died and Florence Henniker has succeeded Emma as Hardy's spouse, this rival will outlive her too. But Florence is the one who is destined to suffer most, the unwilling participant in her husband's rites of incarnation, his incestuous obsession with his own creation: Emma by then can count herself lucky to be dead.)

An early autumn evening and Hardy takes the train to Evershot station. He sees there some mistletoe that had been there ‘ever since last Christmas (given by a lass?), of a yellow saffron parchment colour' – most likely the ‘source' of the mistletoe which Tess finds hanging, like a mockery, over the wedding bed after she has made her fatal confession to Angel Clare: the confession of her ‘past': Alec D'Urberville and the poor baby, dead now of course: the confession of her fault.

The rootless plant, the white berries and fine grey-green leaves that entwine oak trees – the kissing plant that cannot touch the ground – hangs faded and spurned on a small country station. Hardy stands and stares at it, before boarding the little puffer to Dorchester.

Augusta Way and mistletoe. The sad fate of Tess has been decided. A beautiful, dark-eyed young woman is born, who will love, and find her love destroyed by the seducer who came first into her life – and in return for this she will murder him.

The cycle of love, betrayal and revenge has been caught again, and will be set down for posterity by Thomas Hardy, progenitor and lover of Tess.

There – over there – in that dumpy old cottage by the side of the churchyard in Beaminster, is the home of the daughter of Tess, the daughter of the beautiful milkmaid Augusta Way. She was also the love of Thomas Hardy's old age. Her acting career – she played Tess in the theatre – was blocked by Hardy's second wife, Florence. Florence came here, to the cottage in the town by the side of Marshwood Vale, our mother's country –

But first I shall show you

It's 1896, a sultry summer. Hardy spends the season in London, in South Kensington, Pelham Crescent, where the stately white houses with their porticoes and long, slender windows have a formal coldness conducive to one of the worst fits of illness and depression the great writer has suffered in years. He has a chill – then rheumatism – his friend Lady Jeune suggests a trip to Brighton to take the air. On his return, refreshed but still lacking, still wanting … what? that elusive thing, happiness, a sense of well-being … he sets out to enjoy the London season, meets the witty Margot Asquith at a party she gives with her husband who will shortly be Prime
Minister, and even feels well enough to do a few turns of the ‘Blue Danube' waltz with his old friend Mrs Grove.