Tess (17 page)

By July, Hardy is back at Max Gate, much invigorated, his depression and illness forgotten. He decides to go and see his mother at Bockhampton. And he finds her perceptibly older (which reminds him again of mortality, of the passing of time). For Hardy, sex and death are inexorably linked, and the fact of Jemima's ageing, her nearness to becoming a part of his carefully hoarded and nurtured past, drives him to walk out in the fields at Kingston Maurward … to wonder what became of that lovely milkmaid he saw there eight long years ago, the dark-eyed young woman who inspired the writing of
Tess
. He feels his age, through his mother's shrivelling, and he feels his childlessness, too, his lack of youth and warmth; Hardy stops by the entrance to the drive, walks up the untidy road which Dairyman Crick (as Augusta Way's father has been named and immortalized in
Tess
) has no time to weed, and stops by the front door which is already open, as if expecting him. A bale of hay lies in the hall. A chicken rushes out. Hardy smiles and turns to leave. But as he goes, a young woman walks up the drive – a married woman, Hardy can see from her gait and her slightly more rounded figure. He also sees that she is alone and that she is, at twenty-six, an even more beautiful Augusta Way. This time, she smiles back at the tentative visitor, with his hat and his imposing moustache. She invites him in, for tea …

Thomas Hardy searches for his ‘evasive well-beloved'. He has seen her incarnated in woman after woman – but each time, as he comes nearer, she vanishes like the moon behind clouds.

In other words, when Thomas Hardy falls in love, he falls in love with his own creation. His is the male, controlling imagination that devours women in its lair: Monster eats the Muse.

And on the stifling July day in 1896 when the great writer bows to the beautiful if slightly more mature Augusta Way, he finds he has met another incarnation of his desires.

Augusta, the model for Tess, is both the incarnation of the woman he loves and his own creation. (The second version of
The Well-Beloved
appears in 1897, the year following Hardy's visit to Kingston Maurward – as does Augusta's baby daughter. But more of that later.)

Since writing
Tess
, since receiving the scorn and moral indignation, the fame and blame of the most scandalous book of the age – in which a woman commits
murder
, if you can imagine such a thing, and gives birth to a bastard on the way – Hardy has written his fantasy of a man in love with three generations of women.

Now, whether he knows it or not, he will act out the theme of the novel in real life. And it must be said here that Hardy's novels don't only repeat one another in theme, having as their constant the subjects of betrayal, grotesque incongruity in clashing desires and perpetual dissatisfaction in love, but the suffering love causes is in each case associated with the theme of repetition. For all Hardy's novels in one way or another pose the question: why is it that most human beings go through life somnambulistically, compelled to repeat the same mistakes in love, so inflicting on themselves and others the same suffering, again and again?

Hardy, nearing fifty and with
The Well-Beloved
writing its final version in his head (it will also be his last novel), walks into the bright hall where the dust dances against the long sash windows old ‘Dairyman Crick', Augusta's fictional father, has never bothered to cover with the rich Victorian brocades of the age. He feels his own old age settle down around him. He needs fresh blood! He craves the repetition, the greedy cycle of possession which, we know so well, my poor child, springs from the crushing of equality and freedom
that took place so long ago. Hardy may believe he seeks the other half to an androgynous whole – but he whistles for the moon, his double ‘in a changed sex'. How better than to find her already the inspiration for the most ‘living' of his heroines, poor Tess?

Hardy waits in the bare hall while Augusta goes into the pantry and prepares tea. No matter that she doesn't live here any more, that she has married a confectioner named Bugler and lives with him in Dorchester, that she is happy crystallizing the rose and violet petals that decorate her husband's fancy chocolates, that she is happy to have left the hard country life, up at dawn to milk the cows, hoeing turnips in the frost-hard ground. It's of no importance that Augusta likes the town, the staid walk to church on Sundays in a long, deep-green velvet dress with a cloak that has a fur-lined hood. No matter that she wants a family with her husband, a little boy who will look, in her dreams, just like the pleasant
chocolatier
…

To Hardy, Augusta is the incarnation of Tess, the woman he loved and brought into the world, only to have her hanged at the end (as we remember, Hardy loved to see the corpses of the hanged women after a public execution in Dorchester, when he was a boy, the long, bunched and soiled skirts swinging in the wind … ). To Hardy, Augusta is Tess, and Tess is his.

As she comes in from the pantry with a tray, Hardy rises and goes to meet her. He bows low as he relieves her of the cups of chipped Crown Derby, the humble brown teapot used by Dairyman Crick. Tenderly, sighing as if already haunted by nostalgic regret, Hardy leads his Tess over to the fireplace where logs crackle and flare, and takes her in his arms … his long moustaches tickle her extremely as he starts his kiss.

From that embrace came the next incarnation, baby Tess – of Hardy's well-beloved, whose home is over there on the edge of the churchyard of St Mary's in Beaminster. Only metaphorically, of course: Gertrude's mother and father were Mr and Mrs Bugler of Dorchester; but the imagination of the great man rules both generations and when Gertrude acts the part of Tess, she suffers the vengeful rage of Hardy's second wife, Florence.

At the time of Hardy's visit to his much-aged mother at Bockhampton and the surge of erotic fascination and creativity that
followed when he went to call on Augusta Way (now Augusta Bugler), Florence was no more than a sweet possibility on the horizon; a sweet possibility that would be soured, as was his marriage to Emma, when the reality of a woman replaced the fantasy.

But for now – and, as it will prove, again later – the bodily incarnation of Tess is what Hardy wants more than anything in the world.

For Hardy, the theme of misalliance and mismating springs from the stories his mother told him – his mother who had grown up in abject poverty, in that part of northwest Dorset well known for its privations to Victorian chroniclers of misery. It was in the rectangle bounded by Sherborne, Yeovil, Holywell and Minterne, in the village of Melbury Osmond, that Hardy's grandmother, Betsy Swetman, made the ‘first fatal mistake': she married George Hand and condemned herself to lifelong poverty and parish charity.

Hardy's mother Jemima's fireside tales were of an unhappy charity childhood. The cottage where her own widowed mother had brought up seven children, including Jemima, in shameful poverty was in the east quarter of the Melbury Osmond parish, in the direction of Hermitage and Minterne – Minterne with its grand house belonging to the Digby family, its three-tiered garden where long lakes, smothered under carpets of a vivid green weed, lie in the descending slopes of the valley.

Here, where local women, in an area known for its hardness, knew that to live just above subsistence level was the best that could be hoped for, Hardy set his novel
The Woodlanders
. In this square of coppice, woodland and hedge he wrote out the story – the story he always wrote: faithful suitor, flashy rival and a heroine who makes the fatal choice. (This was to be the first of Hardy's ‘darker' works. There had been a sardonic exchange between the author and Leslie Stephen, whose dry comment, ‘The heroine married the wrong man,' drew from Hardy the reply that mostly women did just that. ‘Not in magazines,' Stephen laughed.)

The heroine is Marty South, the dark-eyed beauty who lives in
hardship in that thickly wooded area of northwest Dorset so often described to Hardy by his mother. The rich Mrs Charmond, from a house and estate very like Minterne, buys Marty's lovely long hair, hair that's nearly black but not quite, that dark brown-black that may have come to southwest England from Spain or Morocco, hair that is just like the hair of my sister Tess.

Marty is a low-paid spar-worker. Giles Winterborne, who is a humble coppice-holder and cider-maker (Hardy sings of ‘that atmosphere of cider which … has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards'), meets Marty South. The tragic, inevitable story is played out.

And seventeen years after Thomas Hardy meets his original Tess, Augusta Way (now Bugler), in the hall at Kingston Maurward, a young actress appears in a presentation of
The Woodlanders
by the Dorchester Debating, Literary and Dramatic Society. The young heroine is so moving and appealing in the part of Marty South that even the London critics are astonished by her. On 20th November 1913 her photograph – a dark-eyed beauty with a cloud of brown-black hair and a mouth that is full and lusciously open – appears in the
Daily Mail
. She is described as ‘a natural actress, slender, with expressive eyes'.

Her name? Gertrude Bugler, daughter of Augusta Way. Her father owns a confectioner's shop in South Street, Dorchester. Gertrude Bugler will play a large part in Hardy's last years. She is the final incarnation – in his lifetime, that is.

Look now at the squat, dumpy cottage on the fringes of the graveyard at St Mary's in Beaminster, where Gertrude lived …

Gertrude Bugler, daughter of the inspiration for
Tess
. Poetically conceived by Thomas Hardy.

For, by now, the Minotaur wants his victims to be real. No more webs to be spun, no more invented heroines, who become tiring to play with, as they trace and retrace the thread of his ideas in a labyrinth of his own making. Gertrude, the real, actual Gertrude who so resembles her beautiful mother, will be the next Tess.

The year 1913 is a pivotal one for Thomas Hardy. In November 1912, after years of pain – and shockingly, a whole year of agony – Emma, his wife, dies.

No more shuffling, crippled mounting the stairs to bed after another silent dinner with her husband – the stairs that run behind Hardy's study, and where he had heard her so often climbing – unaided, unloved, a prisoner in her own home of his cruelty and the ignorance of the maids. Even on the day before her death, Hardy makes her come down to preside over a ladies' tea party: Emma is weeping with the severe spasms (possibly gallstones, certainly something that could have been operable if there had been anyone in the world to care for her) that tire her heart and wreck her constitution. Hardy, as always, notices nothing.

In the morning he is called to Emma's bed by a frightened maid. There, in the attic room, where the birds, with whom Emma had an almost magical rapport, flock to the window and look in at their ill protector – there, in the bed Hardy has left unvisited for as long as anyone can remember, poor ‘mad' Emma dies.

Yes, Thomas Hardy made of his wife that well-known Victorian phenomenon, the madwoman in the attic. His neglect and cold indifference alienated her, she became ‘scatty' and the housekeeping got beyond her capabilities. More and more she stayed in the high room with the sloping rafters and called to the birds to fly to her window. Robins, a wren, chaffinches, once even a blue jay, heard the call of the sick, lonely woman. While Hardy boasted of being able to hear the trees he planted sigh as he placed them in the ground, the ‘madwoman' of his creation was the one who was able to reach the denizens of the natural world, with her simple love for them.

Emma dies. Of course there's gossip and excitement when a month later Hardy moves Florence Dugdale into the hideous house at Max Gate. The maids swear they're sleeping together. It's a scandal. And poor Mrs Hardy – he never took her to the doctor, you know – that woman was a saint and he was sleeping with the other woman all along, so they say.

Florence Dugdale. The helper, the amanuensis: another very Victorian figure, with her pale, nervous face and haunting eyes.
Poetic, sensitive … in her long black skirt and modest white blouse she stands on the edge of the trench of the coming World War, her long, finely honed nose pointing always slightly upwards in the direction of the revered, the world-famous Thomas Hardy.

Florence stands behind a seated Emma on the beach at Worthing. Oh poor, dear, mad Emma, in that huge black hat laden with veils and oddities, like an undertaker's birthday party. Florence stands for the future. She is the worm that feeds already on the corpse of the first wife who will be left to die alone and in pain. Florence, for years before Emma's death, was the owner of Thomas Hardy's heart (though, as we know, both wives would be cheated of it, the ashes going for burial to Westminster Abbey and Hardy's heart sandwiched between the two women he married and destroyed).

Florence is mistaken when she thinks she is the proud possessor of that questionable commodity, Thomas Hardy's heart, of course.

We know where his heart really lies – why, it's simple, it lies in the mirror, in the double he creates and likens to his sister, the moon – in the women he fashions from words and sets to live for ever. (For, if you go to Batcombe Down and you see the sinister Crossy Hand I told you of, where Tess was made to place her hand and swear she would no longer ‘tempt' Alec D'Urberville, you'll see the words ‘Tess lives' scrawled there, with a penknife most likely, in the rough stone of the crude little dolmen. And you won't see the words ‘Florence lives' anywhere, I'll bet you, nor Emma Hardy's name either attached to the immortality granted his famous heroine.)