Tess (2 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
For Tess is the pretty one. (The word âpretty' â how I came to hate it in the long evenings in the Mill when neighbours called in: How pretty she is, how pretty, they said of Tess, and looked away from me as though I were a household pet, ugly but for some reason kept there, for what use was I if I couldn't be pretty, at least?) Pretty Tess.
And, just like everything else, the looks passed down from grandmother to granddaughter as if the original beauty, minted God knows how long ago, must stand as currency until the exploitation of the beauty of women is finally stamped out.
It doesn't let you down, Tess's beauty. From whichever angle you look at it, there is perfection. The mouth â some grandmothers ago â was called Eve's mouth: lips just slightly open, full and Cupid-bowed, as if the apple of the tree in Eden is just about to get its first, gleaming bite.
That dark hair. Not black, dark. Some said those dark looks, with eyes so brown-black too, came from the Spanish invaders when they plundered Cornwall and spread their blood into the rest of the Southwest.
And the nose. Tess's nose is delightful, so small and delicate that it suggests she's never far from making a witty or teasing remark and throwing her head back in the air, so you can see the fine arch of her nose. And it's true. Tess is known for her spirit and wit. (Although it's hard to remember just what it was she said, afterwards.) Now, however, she looks very solemn indeed as the âscientists' come up with their handfuls of stones. She slips off her dress as if she did it every day in front of other people.
I pray it will never be my turn, when I see Tess's small breasts, nipples like starfish on the pebble-white of her skin, move tentatively upwards as Alec and Victor come near.
â So where were we? as my mother used to say.
She'd put aside her spectacles, and lay the book on the wide lip of the windowsill and say: I must have been dreaming.
But we all knew she wasn't dreaming at all. Nor did she read from the book that was always pulled out of the bookcase after tea, and had bright pictures by Walter Crane of tangled tree trunks and frogs sitting right in the gold platter of the fairy princess.
What my mother told us wasn't a fairy tale at all.
And as it's the truth â and as you've come here as they always said you would: just like that â mysteriously â I'll tell you where here is. Where you are now, in the last season of the last year of the millennium â and where we were then, on that hot September day in 1954. And long before that and ever since, too, on
Chesil Bank is one of the geological wonders of the world. It is twenty-one miles in length and runs along the southern coast of Dorset, which is in turn in the very south of England before it slopes down to the far west; and it is formed entirely of shingle. It is a natural barrier made by the sea against itself; and the strangest thing, as you will learn when you are older, is that the stones of the shingle are small at the western end (West Bay) and are known as pea-gravel; whereas at the eastern end (Portland) they're so large you could take them for the eggs the swans in the old swannery are encouraged to lay.
This giant bank of sea-shaped pebbles has only been overcome by the sea once â in the great gale of 1824. Then, the church
in the village of East Fleet â along with the rest of the village â was destroyed, and the smugglers' passageway through the vault was inundated. You can see the brasses of the Mohune family; and under them is the vault where they stored their contraband.
If things weren't being smuggled in, along this stretch of flat, wild beach (and there was a brisk smugglers' trade, over waters with so strong an undertow that poor Retty Priddle didn't last five minutes when she threw herself in: but that's another story), then they were literally tossed in, all the way from Spanish America, people said. Gold coins, pieces of eight, have been washed up on Chesil Beach. Flotsam so unexpected no one stopped to think what wreck it might have come from, before helping themselves: porcelain cups, wafer-thin, encrusted with barnacles; mother-of-pearl-handled knives and forks fit for a king on board his schooner, singing and dancing on the night the ship went down. There was a merman once â long ago, mind you. A merman thirteen feet in length, they say. And if he comes again, there'll be a storm far worse than the one before and we'll all be swept out of our beds, to a watery grave somewhere miles inland from that natural sea wall.
Of course there's a lot of superstition in a place where the sea has acted so unusually, has created, in fact, an oddly tropical landscape by its formation of a lagoon that lies landlocked on its nearside and could be mistaken, with its brackish waters and warm temperatures, for a lake in Africa. There's a feeling that anything might fly out from the gardens â tropical, too â which the Fox-Strangways family planted in the late eighteenth century, and where palms and creepers and great bushes of early flowering camellias reinforce the impression of an England gone literally barmy. People walk quickly by the stone wall, that should enclose a park with chestnuts and oaks and is instead as wild with lush vegetation as the first Pacific isle Captain Cook laid his eyes on. Because that flapping in the trees, while obviously only a pigeon or a crow, seems to summon up something foreign and intensely familiar at the same time. A
sou-criant
, maybe, or a great bright bird that just doesn't belong in this part of the world at all.
Any more than you do, my dear.
I have to choose another name for our village â more a hamlet, really â where I grew up and have come back to today, to find you waiting. As was foretold.
I shall call it Nasebury. The secrecy comes not from a desire to be coy but from the need to protect the place from prying eyes, from further curiosity about the unsolved crime of thirty years ago.
Was it here, people would ask, that the bloodstained sheet that had been used to wrap the body of a man was found lying so carelessly by the reed beds? Was it on this stretch of Chesil Bank that poor Retty Priddle, so in love with the angel from Beaminster that she took to drink and lost her senses, plunged over stones to the treacherous undertow of the sea? Isn't there a small pile of stones to mark the spot?
All the other names of the places are real. Abbotsbury ⦠West Bexington ⦠Rodden with the beautiful house set down cheek by jowl with humble cottages ⦠Langton Herring; and, of course, that royal resort of a mad monarch, George III â Weymouth.
Just as the people I shall tell you about are real: Thomas Hardy, who so dominates this whole landscape; his wives and his loves.
Some of the people I shall tell you about seem more real by now than their progenitor and his long-ago loves, the mad wife and the scheming secretary who succeeded Emma and inherited her unhappiness. These people have a life-blood which nothing can staunch: the flippant seductions of Alec D'Urberville linger still in all this part of Dorset; and Tess's heart-rending voice, whether uttering the low diapason of the baptism of her dying child, or singing songs with the other dairymaids at Talbothays, still echoes when the winter wind whistles, when the larks sing on the high ground at Evershot.
And this is because the story is true, true as an old ballad. And long after Hardy was laid to rest at Stinsford between his wives â his ashes, significantly, in the burial place of famous men, Westminster Abbey â his heart with the women he caused such suffering â the ballad is played and played again.
I will explain.
But first, the facts of our life at Nasebury.
It was here â a stone's throw from Abbotsbury, literally, that Alec and Victor, to attract our attention, would take one of those medium-sized stones from Chesil Bank (here, we're at the halfway mark between the pea-gravel of West Bay, near Bridport at the western end, and the giant egg stones in the eastern tip) and throw it plop! into our garden at the side of the Mill as an invitation â a warning? â they were coming to âplay'. And it was there that my mother lived when she married my father, and then stayed on as caretaker when London folk bought the Mill in 1968.
The Mill wasn't working as such when my father lived there. It had fallen into disrepair. My mother heard ghostly feet on their first night there, in the black-out in 1942. But it was a family of white owls that was walking about in the loft over the old beams.
No ghosts here, my mother used to say when we asked about all the tales of Dorset hauntings. My sister Tess said she'd seen the stone eagles from the gateposts at Mapperton fly down the beach on their way to the sea â as they were supposed to do, each midsummer.
â Swans flying in, my mother said, without so much as looking up.
But, I shouldn't be so sure, my father teased her; and Tess always believed him, you could see that: as if the beauty she had from her grandmother, her Tess beauty, made her all the more susceptible to old stories. It was as if she'd lived through it all before â and alas!, as we know now, was due to live through it all over again in her own lifetime.
Not I. The plain younger sister. The goose, half-formed. Yet, as in a fairy story where the ending has gone horribly wrong and the goose fails to turn into a swan, fated to live out her life with the prince. The snag being that the prince doesn't love her.
That I will explain to you, too. Just remember, for now, that I am Liza-Lu; Lizzie; Liz â whatever they choose to call me when my turn comes to play my part. And surely, by now, I have played it long enough.
My father was a romantic. After he was demobbed at the end of the war, he decided to buy the Mill (it had only been rented up till then); but his family, the Hewitts, did come from Dorset, from the wide streets of Bridport where they'd had a chandler's business. (Bridport is the main centre in Britain for rope-making and hemp. To be âstabbed by a Bridport dagger' is to hang on a rope by the neck until you are dead. As Tess did. But that's to tell you later.)
My father had no desire to go into the business. He'd come into a small sum of money from his family, and, as I say, he bought this mill with its long garden on the side of the hill, a garden invisible from the road and bordered by a brown stream that chuckles and clatters over pale stones to the millpond under the house. Above the Mill, at the top of the steep green slopes, stands St Catherine's Chapel.
St Catherine, patron saint of spinsters.
My mother used to say it was odd that she ended up here, when we were nothing to do with spinsters at all, but descendants of a long line of unmarried mothers â as our species was then known.
St Catherine would have laughed, my mother said. But don't deride spinsters, Liza-Lu. Spinsters belonged to the first guilds, in medieval times, that women could join and have control over their own wealth. People came here to buy their lace and linen handkerchiefs.
My father â I keep starting again with those words, and perhaps it's because we none of us had any real sense of having a father that the words stick in my throat and I go careening off to the genetic structures of our ancient ballad, most lately taken up by Thomas Hardy and certain to remain here until the structure of society and life are utterly changed.
It wasn't that our father was distant, just that he seemed totally irrelevant to us and to the future we saw so clearly marked out for us as girls. The romantic streak in him seemed to obfuscate the
facts of the difference between his and our outlook and expectations of life.
My father helped tend the swans at the old swannery at Abbotsbury between February and September. By the side of the brackish water of the lagoon he built artificial nests, to encourage laying. These are mute swans and they aren't fierce; so he encouraged people to walk among them, on the shingle shore of their colony, and by the side of the river (the same as flows through our garden at the Mill) where hydrangeas and bamboo grow to a gigantic height in the subtropical climate.
It was as if the swans were all my father needed in the world.
But you will ask, one day, about my father's family, and the best way I can answer you, I believe, is to say that that is the wrong direction to look altogether.
You must look at your mother, and her mother before her, and all the long line of women born without names of their own, given or sold to names that would never be truly theirs: as nameless, as interchangeable as the eyeless fertility statues found in the old settlements all over Europe and Britain, with mammae and thighs and vulvas as marked and carved as the old worship sites cut in the clay. The history of these women is the history of you and your mother. And, because, for all these women, the suffering and the song was the same: toil, childbirth, death; and for those who fell outside, another song repeated itself: rape, childbirth, desertion or betrayal, let me tell you your history as I must tell it to Ella, who no longer goes to school.
Think of me in 1958, as I daydreamed my way through the lessons Mrs Moores gave in our little school, where she tried so hard to expel us from our narrow shelf of land behind Chesil Beach and into the world â the âreal' world, of politics and money and men.
But we were already conditioned to be girls.
â Which twin has the Toni?
â Did you hear that Retty Priddle ran away to the caravan site
last night and her mum found her and Victor on the beach at Charmouth?
â Did you see that jumper in Mullens in Bridport?
â No, it's not my shade. Might suit Retty, that lilac.
â You're
green
with envy, Liza-Lu. That's your trouble
Poor Mrs Moores. She had to bring out the strap. A strap of leather about an inch thick â and down it came on the palms of our hands, for chattering and giggling right through the Stuart kings.
But what can you expect? Those kings seem distant to a bunch of girls. And the boys at Nasebury school: they don't pay much attention either, as they doodle in their books and score initials and rude words in the still-left-over-from-wartime desks.
But the boys will inherit the sceptre of the kings.