Tess (25 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
Gertrude's âincredulous amazement' at the speech of the poor demented Florence is perhaps a little overstated. But what are you to say, with a baby crying in the next room, in a cottage with the washing catching the rain and it would be impossible bad manners to say âExcuse me' to the genteel wife of England's most famous writer and dash out and bring it in?
What can she be but incredulous, when Florence says the great poet has written two poems describing the running off together of Gertrude and TH?
Look surprised, a tiny bit alarmed, when Florence says a journey to London could imperil her husband's life, at his age â and he had been determined to go there for the Haymarket matinées, of course.
Agree softly, quietly, while your husband comes in and hears the
baby's wail and steps in quite sharp, wondering what you're at, neglecting to pick up the nipper â¦
Gertrude Bugler never forgave Florence Hardy for denying her the chance of appearing in the West End in 1925. When, with Florence's active encouragement, she did at last play Tess in London after Hardy's death, she felt that she was already too old to embark upon a professional career as a romantic actress. Comments at the time (August 1929) included the fact that critics hardly knew how to judge her out of her native surroundings.
James Agate, deploring the mistaken generosity of the audience, went further and traced her failure to the fact that she felt the part of Tess so passionately. âDrama', he said, quoting William Archer, âconsists of imitation and passion.' Passion Mrs Bugler certainly had. âWhen she wept her body shook, and one knew she had not ordered its shaking. She was “feeling her part”; and those storms of weeping caused the spectator more distress than delight.'
It was only recently that Hardy's poem âAn Expostulation' was accepted by scholars â and then by Gertrude â as a description of his feelings about the young actress and her desire to go to London. But â as you'll see â it's more likely that the verses, wooden and unconvincing as they are, were penned by the morbidly jealous Florence:
AN EXPOSTULATION
Why want to go afar
Where pitfalls are
When all we swains adore
Your featness more and more
As heroine of our artless masquings here,
And count few Wessex' daughters half so dear?
Why paint your appealing face,
When its born grace
Is such no skill can match
With powder, puff or patch,
Whose every touch defames your bloomfulness,
And with each stain increases our distress?
Yea, is it not enough
That (rare or rough
Your lines here) all uphold you,
And as with wings enfold you,
But you must needs desert the kine-cropt vale
Wherein your foredames gaily filled the pail?
Thomas Hardy died on 11th January 1928, at Max Gate, the maid Nellie Titterington running down the stairs at nine in the evening to call his wife.
Nellie it was who heard Hardy's last words, for she had been sitting in the dressing-room leading off from Hardy's bedroom. âShe is such a little person yet she has seen such big operations', were the last recorded words of Thomas Hardy, followed by the word âblood'. And when death came, he cried out to Eva Dugdale, who held his hand to support him, âEva, what is this?'
Hardy is dead, his wife Florence sits quietly by the deathbed, and it's time to return to the âbig operations' soon to be uncovered in the scoop of land behind West Bay: the story of our own family, our own Tess.
These are the scenes I remember. Before the sun goes down, before they come for us. This is how the story was played out.
Dr Ryall was his name. He was kind at first â âkind', how hard it is to stomach that word, a word used when referring to a master's treatment (when he feels like it) of his slaves.
And Tess was a slave, as all women are, to her biology. There was a baby growing in her, wasn't there? And as soon as she started to throw up in the mornings (she and Alec were in a council flat in East Coker over by Yeovil then; the flat belonged to Alec's uncle, an alcoholic who worked as a hospital porter and turned a blind eye, as far as Alec was concerned: the rest of his family had washed their hands of him; he was an inveterate liar and petty crook) â as soon as Tess began to show unmistakable symptoms of pregnancy, well, Alec upped and left.
He said he was going to Bournemouth, to look for work. And â as even you, little Ella, inveterate watcher of TV soaps, could have guessed, he never came back. You've heard the ballad. People here still talk of our own Retty â who drowned herself for love. Put the big stones from Chesil Beach in the pockets of her coat and went down, down ⦠they found her body washed up at Portland, battered by the rocks after being swirled round and round like a
corpse on a merry-go-round by the ferocious double currents known as the Race.
Don't drown yourself for love â and Tess didn't either. She felt like a drowning woman, though â she said she saw all her life ahead of her dragging her down and down with a child she couldn't support, no love, no life, nothing.
And I didn't even like him, she said.
Dr Ryall gave an appointment to my sister Tess â she took me along for company and help but I wasn't much good to her. I felt embarrassed and kept smiling â the smile a timid young woman gives to a powerful man, and Dr Ryall got at Tess through me, because of it.
It's a life you're taking.
Have you thought this over seriously?
Is there a father?
Do you realize you've left it very late?
Your life could be in danger.
Do your parents know about this?
I said, whose child is this?
And in the street outside that gloomy great hospital in Yeovil, Tess crying, and her voice hoarse with all the sobs she hadn't shed in all the years since she'd known she'd been chosen as the next in a long line of Ruined Maids.
The man in the new Ford with the shiny covers who gave us a lift all the way to Langton Herring with Tess in front had his hand right up her skirt, for payment, while I felt as sick as a pregnant cat myself with the smell of that bright new plastic in the car.
But then I always felt what Tess felt: I caught her flu, I ended up with her life mate, I stand in for her now and tell her story. But soon you will know where she is, you may even see her and she will be as beautiful now as she was then, that's her curse, you might say.
Mother Hum's cottage. A new smell, to my suddenly sensitive, sympathetically pregnant nose: the smell of cats, and unwashed
stone flags and damp bread left lying for the cats in saucers of rancid milk.
Oh Tess, don't go in there! Don't do it!
And our mother, our witch-mother with her face a rugged weather-beaten hue from all the long hours at West Bay, shifting fish in icy bales, her eyes as muddy dark grey and brown as the sea on a relentless dayâ
Our mother says, Mother Hum will look after you, Tess. She'll see you right.
And Tess, seeing her own weakness for the first time â seeing she can't go back to Dr Ryall and plead one more time â seeing she is woman at last, someone with so few choices and all of them wrong, or âbad', cries out in dismay and despair when we walk into the evil-smelling cottage.
Mother Hum must be ninety, for God's sake! This is 1963!
It's your decision, our mother says. But she has no warmth in her voice. She has shown Tess she'll support her â but both know it wouldn't work. Does she dread another Tess coming into the world? Did her own roving childhood with the gypsies turn her against the possibility of loving another nomad child; conceived in a fit of loyalty to the past on Tess's part, the whole shameful episode coming from a spring of hatred for the Mapperton arrogance?
Who would look after this child?
I swear to you that this is true.
Mother Hum comes forward and leads us both into the kitchen. Yes, she has a pointed nose that comes down and nearly meets her chin.
Yes, she has a cat that jumps straight up on to her shoulder as she cackles at us.
And yes, there's a big pot on the stove that's bubbling away with a slurping noise like a potion horror film.
Mother Hum scoops out some of the mixture and puts it in a Woolworth's mug.
Black berries of the bay tree. (Oh, who could have foreseen that the beautiful Tess, with all that promise, all that glowing free spirit, would come to this? Our mother, perhaps: for bay leaves are used for divination, the priestesses at Delphi wore garlands of bay to foretell the future of each seeker of his destiny, and my mother had the gift of prophecy, she learnt that before she could write or read.)
A leaf of bog asphodel.
Wormwood, dogstooth, juniper berries.
Jack-in-the-pulpit (
Arisaema triphyllum
). Mix them all together. Jack-in-the-pulpit certainly must not be left out â poor Tess, how will you answer those disapproving Jacks, placed in the pulpit two thousand years ago to preach and warn of the weakness and depravity of women? Those Jacks like ⦠Dr Ryall? Or our father, who doesn't know yet that his elder daughter is visiting a witch to rid herself of an unwanted child?
Drink it down, Tess. There is no answer, no account of yourself that you can give which will satisfy the Reverend Jack.
The pain. I feel it too. I sit in the little room at the side where Tess lies moaning on a sofa with broken springs.
Our mother has gone back to West Bay, to collect fish for the smart new shop she manages in Bridport. Does she mind too much to stay? Does she hope a baby will be washed up to her on the shore one day, as you were, Baby Tess?
Then we see it. There has been someone here before us. This morning, it must have been. Early, while Mother Hum picked the herbs in that wild garden at the back â all the neighbours complain, but the council can't do a thing about it.
At dawn, some poor girl â¦
The chipped enamel basin in the corner ⦠Oh God, Tess sees it at the same time as I do.
Was it shame that made Tess's predecessor, here in this Devil's kitchen, come to an old woman and not go on the National Health?
Did Dr Ryall make her feel like a murderess, so she went out into the neat forecourt of Yeovil General stuffing Kleenex into her mouth to stop her from screaming?
Or had she left it too late?
The thing in the basin heaves gently in a pool of clotted blood.
Oh my God! It's alive!
Worst of all â no, it can't have been Mother Hum's cat, they don't make a noise like that â
We're running. It's like a terrible dream, where the colours are lurid but the scene is pretending to be peaceful, with wheat stacks golden in the sun and the lanes still filled with wild flowers â
We reach the high ridge of shingle that is Chesil Beach. Tess is in agony and I feel it too, burning right through my body and turning my legs to water.
Down â down â we fall, we roll on the steep bank. A man sees us and shouts at us not to swim there.
He thinks we don't know Chesil Beach! He thinks we're just two silly girls, two townies, doing this for a bet.
Tess reaches the sea first. The man stares and stares as she plunges her head in, as she drinks and drinks â¦
The man starts to run towards us.
There, high on the shingles, Tess vomits up all Mother Hum's terrible concoction. She gasps and she heaves and â¦
The man is just a few yards away. He shouts that he'll go for a doctor.
And he stands rooted to the spot and staring at us even more as we laugh ⦠and laugh ⦠and laugh â¦
â No ⦠no, thanks ⦠not a doctor ⦠we're able to pant at last, with the tears streaming down our cheeks and the man quite put out and walking away.
Two silly girls, high on marijuana, he wonders ⦠but what is there to tell the police anyway?
Regretfully (he would have liked to rope in male authority: there's just something too out of control, too
prehistoric
about these crying, laughing, vomiting women on the beach), he shrugs and walks away along the beach towards Burton Bradstock.
And that, Baby Tess, is how your mother's life was saved. And how you, in turn, can be here today.
Our mother left work and came back here to the Mill to care for the baby. Her face was always unsmiling â but she loved the child, you could tell that by the way she hummed and sang to her and held her up close as if trying to listen to the sound of the sea out of her little pink ears.
Our mother hummed.
And Tess sang. She went out later and later â often she never came home at all â and in bars and pubs and draughty halls, in marquees in fields where cows wandered amongst the stoned crowds â on platforms and in simple back rooms, Tess sang.
The sixties had got going in earnest, you see. I was too young to take part â and I looked after your mother, helped our mother Mary to make the dresses and tiny dungarees, wash the clothes that looked like rags compared to the togs of the neat rich children who had moved into the area along with the boom in tourism and âremote retreats'. I took your mother for walks along that endless beach.
Tess sang. She had the âbest white female voice since Helen
Shapiro' â that's what the man said, and before we knew where we were, Tess was signed up for every gig in the country.
Our local Tess. So beautiful, so sad â the ballads she sang made people cry â and made the man (his name was Walter Something-or-other) wealthy and greedy for more.
The story was beginning to play itself out. Walter wanted Tess to go to London, to the States too. She could cut records, she could sell a million copies â¦
But Tess wanted to stay near her baby.
Our mother said she'd had the baby dumped on her a long time now; she'd got used to it. She told Tess to go if she wanted.
But Tess couldn't bring herself to go.
Our father left the Mill after Tess and the baby came. One night â after Tess had come in late, and she was singing, in the bath, I think it was, our father John Hewitt came in very pale and said he was going out and he wasn't coming back. (He had better manners than Alec, you could say.)
But we all knew he couldn't bear his best, his most beautiful swan, whose plumage had turned in his mind a sooty black on the day she gave herself to a man â he couldn't stand his Tess being here with a child and no shame in the world left in her, and singing too, to make matters worse. Our father hated her new-found independence, the money she earned, her gawky body, a too-thin swan who wouldn't come to his call, never had.
He would never be able to plan her nesting now â arrogant, wicked Tess, she had taken the law into her own hands â and he walked out that night and didn't come back.
â He'll be all right, our mother said, and sighed.
Secretly, I worried for our mother. It seemed her witch-strength was draining out of her every day.
And it was true. Tess had deprived her of her fierce freedom.
She had tied her own mother down. And lines had grown on Mary's forehead, over the sterilizer that didn't work properly, and the hand-me-downs old Mrs Moores gave her that weren't fit for a tramp's child, and the push-chair she said was hurting the poor little baby's back.