Tess (21 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
The part of the Queen of Cornwall has been written for a young actress named Gertrude Bugler â who else?
The story, a Tristan and Iseult tragic passion play, with its stark elements of love, jealousy and death, has a direction âRequiring no Theatre or Scenery' â this to show that the Tintagel setting, the Tintagel of Hardy's youth and harmony with Emma, âan Iseult of my own', is so powerfully set in the imagination of the poet (and so inextricably bound up by now with his passion for Gertrude) that to transport the old theme of love, betrayal and death away from the amphitheatre of Wessex would be in itself a betrayal. Since
Tess
, the old story must be played out hereabouts, with a first wife as a ghostly reminder of Hardy's own first, terrible betrayal.
Florence faces backwards â and sees the past and the evergreen passion her husband entertains for Emma. She faces forwards, and sees the fresh beauty of Gertrude Bugler. As depressed wives will, she confides in the young Gertrude that the actress seems to have so much before her in life â there'll be a new baby, an acting career if she wants it â whereas Florence has everything behind her â and childless as well, poor Florence.
Gertrude hardly hears the moans of the woman in the baggy cardigan, with haunted eyes. She does indeed strain to the future â she will be the Queen of Cornwall â after that, as Hardy promised, she will surely be Tess. What has she to fear?
But the Queen of Cornwall Gertrude cannot be. She's pregnant again.
And Thomas Hardy goes about the house humming the musical setting for
The Queen of Cornwall
, he goes to Dorchester, hears the
actors read through their parts, smiles at Florence and even goes so far as to ask her advice over a poem. (Florence, fresh from another rummage through the wastepaper basket, is happy to oblige: this way she can kill Hardy's still monstrous infatuation for Mrs Bugler of Beaminster, she can seize the poems at source.) âHe asked me which was the better phrase,' Florence writes to Sydney Cockerell, â“tender-eyed”, or “meek-eyed”. I pointed out that “tender-eyed” is used in the Bible (in reference to Leah) as meaning “sore-eyed” â which was why Jacob didn't want her. So a little biblical knowledge is handy at times: “tender-eyed” was promptly abandoned.'
Florence looks with hatred at the scrawled âtender-eyed' on the slips of paper that waft down from Hardy's table. She sees the eyes â the eyes of Tess â that have shone in her husband's life ever since he gave birth to the immortal heroine. And she sees Gertrude's eyes â meek, yes â is the foolish woman actually in love with a man sixty years older than herself? Could it be â no, impossible! Hardy is too old, for all his noonday heart that beats at the sight of a pretty face. But Florence vows grimly to herself that she will make Gertrude âsore-eyed' all right, if this humiliating nonsense goes on one minute longer. She'll destroy the woman â make sure that Jacob doesn't want his Leah ever again.
Hardy sleeps badly as Gertrude's pregnancy wears on. He could be with child himself, Florence thinks scornfully, as the old bard wakes complaining of dizziness, of a craving for this or that at any hour of the night. Tiny by now, resembling nothing so much â to one of the frequent guests who pour through Max Gate to pay their compliments â as âun vieux petit docteur suisse', Hardy lies right on the side of the bed as if half-longing to fall out, and disappear from his conjugal life with Florence for ever.
In the early hours of Sunday 23rd October as Hardy lies foetally curled in the ugly big bed with the mahogany headboard Florence has rested wearily against on so many long, deserted afternoons and evenings â he has a strange dream. You could put it down to the vertiginous position he now adopts in sleep â or not, there have been many interpretations. But it's not a dream he confides to his
wife â even though he wakes whimpering like a baby. He writes a description of it instead to the wife of Harley Granville-Barker, adviser to the text of
The Queen of Cornwall
. And he sends off the letter before Florence, early in the morning, can ransack his blotter and his writing-case for his latest outpourings. Wessex bounds along beside the great man as he goes through a late autumnal mist to the little red post-box nailed to a yew tree half a mile outside the precincts of Max Gate.
Hardy wants his dream to be read and understood. This is what Mrs Barker received:
I dreamt that I stood on a long ladder which was leaning against the edge of a loft. I was holding on by my right hand, & in my left I clutched an infant in blue & white, bound up in a bundle. My endeavour was to lift it over the edge of the loft to a place of safety. On the loft sat George Meredith, in his shirt sleeves, smoking; though his manner was rather that of Augustus John. The child was his, but he seemed indifferent to its fate, whether I should drop it or not. I said, âIt has got heavier since I lifted it last.' He assented. By great exertion I got it above the edge, & deposited it on the floor of the loft: where upon I awoke.
Augustus John was the father of innumerable children.
Like you, Baby Tess â and like my sister Tess before you â these babies are babies of dreams, spirit-babies, love-children â never recognized or registered under law, but there all the same, born and reborn, seen by some, invisible to others.
Maybe Augustus John represented the father of these unnamed children, none of them born in wedlock â perhaps, as Hardy was the creator of Tess, he saw the baby he carried up the loft stairs to George Meredith (author of the verse epic
Modern Love
) and the promiscuous Bohemian painter, as the baby his Tess was bearing. (It's more âpoetic' to leave a real-life husband and father out of the equation.)
We cannot know how Hardy interpreted his dream. But, as he
walks back from the post-box and looks up at a late October sky that's clearing from the west, he sees a flock of wild geese coming over â and he stops and looks up, and listens.
Hardy knows that ratchet geese, as they are called â and they make a noise like a pack of hounds in full cry, as they go high over Max Gate, where Florence presides sadly over a Sunday morning breakfast table â are in legend the souls of unbaptized children, wandering through the air until the Day of Judgment.
Hardy goes into the dining room. The hotplate groans with kidneys, haddock kedgeree, fried eggs that have already shrivelled and turned greenish at the edges. But after his dream of the night before, Hardy is as squeamish as a pregnant woman. He takes a slice of dry toast â and holds out his cup for scalding coffee poured by his wife.
He had a bad night, Hardy tells Florence when she asks him how he slept (although she knows perfectly well). And she looks bleakly at him, from behind her array of silver pots and jugs, shrouded in tea cosies. Hardy feels he has already arrived at Judgment Day, as he sips the murky stuff that Cook will insist on mixing with chicory.
As it may be Judgment Day for us today â when we have to answer the questions the so-careful man in the dark suit will ask us, when he comes to the Mill: Can you inform us, please, as to the whereabouts of a Miss Tess Hewitt? If deceased, may we see the Certificate of Death? Can you please come to identify the remains of the body found in the pit behind the George Hotel at West Bay? How long have you known about this?
For now, though, let's remember it's a lovely morning, and this remote hinterland of Chesil Beach looks particularly alluring, with the stately eighteenth-century house at Rodden looking as if it's fresh out of a film where young squires cavort with fresh-faced girls in caps and striped dresses â and the little road that winds up to Langton Herring bright either side with lords and ladies, as they
call those orange berries on stalks, like sentinels looking out of the hedge as we walk up there. Remember that this is the road Tess â and I, her younger sister, necessary and unwanted both at the same time â had to walk up after Tess came back to the Mill three months since she ran off with Alec and threw up in the downstairs toilet. (Our father kept it so clean since our mother left home that no one wanted to use it any more, the antiseptic smell and the swirl of highly coloured chemical, and the stiff brush in its plastic tray by the side of the lavatory seeming to stand for everything that had gone wrong with our father's life.) But this time Tess couldn't wait to run upstairs â and she said it, she choked out the words just as (as luck would have it) John Hewitt himself was walking in at the door, tired and wet from a long shift at the swannery. âAlec's gone off, Liza-Lu. Oh Jesus Christ, what'm I going to do? I'm pregnant!'
Those were Tess's words. I'll never forget them. I don't think women ever do, even if they've been said, as no doubt Tess's have, one hundred million times before. And I won't forget our journey â hitching a lift as we did just now, Baby Tess, to the cottage my mother shared in Langton Herring. âIt'll mean going to see Mother Hum,' Tess said. And she wept â just as we passed this field on the right here, with its orange stubble the colour of West Bay beach at low tide, when the shingle is shown to have another layer, a secret double that's not stones at all but a coarse sand, lion-hued as that rough field exhausted by harvesting. âWe'll ask Mother,' I said â for what else was there to say? âMaybe she'll make you all right, Tess.'
The trouble was, neither of us knew what âall right' was meant to mean. It was a state to which girls aspired in those days, not to be âall right' could have dire consequences, as our own mother's hospital stay and electric shock treatment had grimly shown. But â with pregnancy â what was all right and what was not? To bear a child was a wonderful, miraculous â and even highly commended â thing. Yet somehow we knew that no one would think that Tess's baby was a very all right proposition (least of all Tess herself, but we'll come to that in a minute). However she did it, our mother Mary Hewitt was depended on to magic the problem away â or to
transform the problem, like a bale of hay turned overnight into gold by the little folk â into a gift. We walked up the road without the slightest idea which our newly powerful â and frequently violent â witch-mother would choose to advise.
There is the tree. It stands to the side of the twisted little cottage my mother lived in before she came home to the Mill, to die. The tree is a birch, and in spring it rustles small green leaves with a sound like the dress my mother used to wear when we were children â before the inhospitality of the world sent her to seek refuge in madness. But children, famously, cling to conventional memories; and I loved the sound my mother's dress made when she ran down the stairs to greet my father, and tell him, like Doris Day in the movies she took us to in Dorchester, that his supper was on the table. After the birch tree has passed into a heaviness of summer, and then lets leaves dance away, turning only the very palest yellow before they go (as they are going now), then the tree, our mother, is at its most beautiful, the soft bruises on the trunk circling the whites of her eyes still trapped there in the silvery, tender bark.
The tree is by a small stream, and we stand waiting for the first puff of wind to get the topmost leaves dancing â like the mobiles that came into fashion just after your mother, Tess's baby, was born, and we tied them, metal scraps of silver and red, to the top of the crib. Generations of mothers and daughters run in the tree, like mercury â and she sees us, the leaves begin to move, the breeze comes to our aid, just as it always did in the days when our foremothers worshipped trees and water.
We'll rest here a while, and I'll tell you of the last of Hardy's monstrous loves â the love he had for the daughter of his invented Tess â and how it wanders the landscape still, waiting for the story to be played out. (And even my mother, the tree, cannot stop the old plot, played out again and again.)
This is the very last act of the incarnation of our Hardy's new Tess.
October 1924 â and it's the time of Florence's illness, the illness that has built up over these years of the passion of Thomas Hardy, her husband, for a young actress. It's as if the swollen gland on Florence's neck is trying to trumpet out the horror and revulsion the poor woman feels at her long incarceration in âdrear middle age', an incarceration tortured by glimpses of the youth and beauty that once had been hers. The gland â ugly, making a monster of the once-elegant Florence â has been diagnosed as a potentially cancerous tumour, and Florence must go to London and have it cut out. Hatred and jealousy signal their threat to spread through Florence â and soon, she feels morbidly, she may be sharing a grave with poor Emma in Stinsford graveyard. (Hardy has, as usual, flinched from any help or sympathy at the time of illness; his reason for not accompanying his wife to the London nursing home is that Wessex the dog would have âbroken his heart (literally) if we had both gone away'.
Florence may find scant comfort in the fact that her death could be guaranteed to provide Hardy with some poems as fine as those he wrote after the death of his first wife. But she leaves on 30th September with the worst possible forebodings: she sees Gertrude installed at Max Gate (though how could she be, really, with a husband and young baby at home in Beaminster?); she weeps as she waves goodbye to Wessex, who jumps up at the mudguard of the car like a demented beast as she is driven away. She may never come back. And Hardy, deep in rehearsals for
Tess
, will find himself a happy bachelor, married at last to the woman he brought forth, like Zeus, from his own head. Poor Florence! For all that the operation went well and Sydney Cockerell wrote twice in that day to Hardy to keep up his spirits, to reassure him that his wife would
come back, Florence knows that only her absence, the possible black hole of death, will revive his love. And she is right: on 9th October, when Florence feels restored enough to return from London, Hardy commemorates his feelings in the astonishingly beautiful poem âNobody Comes', which does indeed show the absence, the nothingness and blackness of death, the hoped-for and dreaded return of Florence.