Tess (4 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
â Where do babies come from, Liza-Lu?
Ella doesn't mean the question as once she might, when the gooseberry bush or the crude details of the biology lesson were the only answers to the first essential question a child will ask.
It's not like nearly half a century ago, when Alec Field explored Tess as she lay coiled as a fossil shell on the beach at Chesil Bank, her soft body in the shallow chamber she had made for herself in the stones, her head protruding like a squid.
By the time it was my turn it had come on to rain again and I was spared. But Retty Priddle, down on the coarse sand the colour of a lion's mane, which is only visible at low tide, had her knickers down in the waves and her left hand on a part of Victor that protruded, too, from his grey shorts like the soft head of an ammonite from its shell.
No, it's not like then. Men âgot you pregnant' and you had to âcatch' them or suffer the stigma of illegitimacy and shame.
Was the primeval urge to give birth the reason Tess allowed the stone to be pushed into her â a reverse, you might say, from the condition of her progenitors, seventy billion years ago, where the stone carapace was a place to breed alone. Did she have this urge, so strongly even at the age of seven, that she would countenance Victor's preposterous âgame' in the hope it would lead to the real thing?
Tess didn't know. Nor could anyone know. Something about the âgame' led them back all those millions of years to the first appearance of the male.
And, like the first male, Victor strides and struts on the beach to attract the desire and attention of Tess. Without him, she cannot give birth.
It's different now, and Ella knows it. Ella's question comes after seeing â whether she understands them or not â countless news stories on TV: surrogacy, artificial insemination, test-tube babies, drug fertility scandals with six or eight in a litter. Sperm banks, anonymous donors. Genetic engineering. Where do babies come from, Liza-Lu?
We're back in the Cretaceous age. With modern science we can reproduce by ourselves.
But men are more powerful than we, and they will stop us â sooner or later. Very likely, sooner.
Our power is now that we can do without them. Sperm can be frozen a thousand years. In a millennium's time, it will be as if you, today, were the child of a silk weaver or a Saxon farmer â or a royal prince. In the here and now, we don't need men any more.
Not for physical strength: we protect ourselves against danger with electronic alarms and all-female services. Not for manufacturing and heavy engineering: the Industrial Revolution is over.
But they won't let us get away with it. Certainly not.
It is they who must change and adapt.
And us along with them, if we and the planet are to survive.
So I say to Ella: Babies come from Love.
And she looks up at me with that uncomfortably accusing squint â and sticks her tongue right out at me, in front of the vicar and assorted worthies as they leave the village shop.
It could be true, I think, if the chain of desolation could be broken, with the coming of the new Baby Tess.
It looked at first like a bundle of old clothes, lying in the eelgrass by the edge of the lagoon.
The swans had crossed the Fleet a few days before, and their
deserted nests were higher than the body, which, in its coiled, uncomfortable position, was like one of those men found in a peat bog â unreal somehow, although obviously human.
And my mother Mary Hewitt was poking at it with a stick â one of those long twigs, to be precise, that the swanherd brings in to help the birds build their nests. It was six in the morning and barely light: we'd just passed the equinox, and the gales had brought the sea right up to the height of Chesil Beach.
Had the body been washed out to sea and then come in again with the equinoctial gales?
Or had it been dumped there the night before, in the sand-fringed grass at the edge of the water?
One thing was certain. There had been a thick fog earlier that night and no one could swear they'd heard the outboard engine of a small boat as it made its way up the coast to West Bay. Not Tess, or our mother, or me.
So that was September 1969 â September the twenty-second â and my mother's expression is something I'll never forget. Even though I hadn't been there at the time â even, as I knew but couldn't bear to know, she wanted most of all to punish herself. It was as if she wanted so badly to punish someone for this unthinkable â unbearably foul â impossible â act, that she'd thrash the daylights out of me for want of anyone else in the vicinity.
And she nearly did. She held the stick high above her head. No, I won't forget. Nothing compares with the anger of a mother. (Even if, as I was to discover later, the anger was really turned against herself.)
The crime of your grandmother â my sister â has reverberated, as it must until the chain is sundered. The chain of passion, betrayal and revenge goes on â and your mother has abandoned you here, as unthinking as any mother who has had no mother of her own to teach her how to care for you. If she comes for you, she won't stay long. She's restless, your poor mother, and she can't settle, as the swans do, year after year in the same place.
After all, her mother was a murderess.
But this is a sad lullaby, for a newcomer to the world. So, while I tell you that my mother poked the body again, and I went right up to it and saw the blood ooze up under the shirt, I'll tell you as well about the swannery, and how my father loved it so much that he spent all his time there, away from the ship's chandler's office in Bridport, and how my mother came to hate the place, almost as if she were jealous of the swans and thought my father loved them more than he loved her (which he did, of course).
Abbotsbury Swannery is unique in that it concentrates on mute swans: nowhere else do they breed colonially, as they do here in Dorset.
A colony was first recorded here in 1393. The swans nest on the northern side of the saline Fleet, which is a seven-and-a-quarter-mile stretch of water â as you know, between the mainland and Chesil Bank, and itself unique in the British Isles.
Ella walks up to me. It's a warm, late summer day that I've chosen to sit on the shingle bank and tell my sister Tess's baby granddaughter how her history goes, and Ella, still refusing school â the cut bus service only aiding and abetting her in her wish to have nothing to do with lessons which have themselves been brutally cut and oversimplified â cares little for Nature. She likes crime, romance, treachery â like you see it on TV. She says:
â What happened to that man you were telling us about, Liza-Lu? The man you said they'd find buried under the stones one fine day?
â Let me finish, I say. The main oddness, in a place as steeped in the unusual as Abbotsbury Swannery, is the colonial persistence of the swans. Most of this species nest apart from others of their kind, whereas those at Abbotsbury, nesting close to each other, then proceed to drown each other's cygnets as soon as they take to the water. So, while there would normally be strong selective pressure to nest further apart and prevent such internecine slaughter, this pressure is mysteriously missing from our colony of mutes at the Fleet.
Our world is overcrowded and dying.
If you interfere with Nature, my great-great-grandmother (she
who ran a School of Witches, at Rodden) would say, Nature will come one day and strike back at you.
â So, Ella says, interested at last (probably by the tale of drowning cygnets), are the swans meant by Nature to die like that?
And if they are, why?
And what is the body of a man doing there, anyway?
I'll try to explain, Ella, but first I must tell you that a man does â and did â interfere with Nature. He was my father, John Hewitt, and he and his forefathers have been swanherds at Abbotsbury for as long as our foremothers were going on their knees up to St Catherine's Chapel on the hill and praying to the patron saint of spinsters.
He interferes from motives of kindness â and economy, of course.
The procedure is to save a certain number of cygnets each year (about one hundred, just as they did at the time of the first count, in 1591), and to keep them in seven pens until they are old enough and strong enough not to be drowned.
They will then be further protected by the best pairs of swans who will acquire most young.
This rearing is the only unnatural event in the swans' lives. They are fed at this time but thereafter are free to feed as they please (zostera and sea lettuce). They aren't pinioned: the good, natural food of the Fleet keeps them there. In summer there are about five hundred â and double that in December, when the swannery is closed to visitors.
And â I say â as Baby Tess sleeps at last in the carry-cot at my feet and I pick up a shell and hold it near her blue-white ear â the gales from the north blow over snow geese, sometimes, and ospreys too.
â Ospreys are extinct, Ella says in the cross voice of a child who, in truth, is missing school.
The Mill has a great room at first-floor level, with the millwheel in the centre and all the old beams in the roof, which at the southern end of the room are so low they can give you a bad knock on the head if you aren't careful.
On the morning of 21st September, 1963, at nine o'clock, that's exactly what my father did: he hit his head on a beam and he wept â but whether it was from real pain or from the knowledge that his daughter Tess had got pregnant by a man, it would be hard to say.
I stood there staring at him.
I couldn't for the life of me understand why my mother had told him, at all. It was a secret between us.
Pity the daughter who can have no secrets with her mother.
The child of happy parents is an orphan. And, although my father loved the swans, and sometimes hardly saw my mother in daylight for months on end, she told him everything.
So I stood there gaping, as my father wept. I didn't know until much later that my mother, just for this once, hadn't told him everything. Not by any means.
Like the boat trip she knew she would take with Tess when it all became too much to bear, down the coast and against the ferocious current of Chesil Beach, all the way to West Bay.
For now, though:
â Where
is
Tess? says my father in a full voice when he has finished crying.
His pain and disappointment were terrible to see. But it wasn't the first time I'd seen them. For my father, while struggling to join the modern world, had all his life been firmly rooted as any Victorian in the old values.
I don't think he once noticed the chemical calendar on the wall
of the bathroom in our creaking old house: the Pill, pinned in its plastic space bubble to the wall, for Tess to take (not me, not yet, even in 1963).
I don't think my father, either, had accepted Tess's life since she had startled him by growing breasts and slamming the door of her room in his face, and playing âMr Tangerine Man' until the sound came out of the walls and seeped right into the quiet valley by the walls of the Old Barn at Abbotsbury.
And after, he'd know, of course, that Tess had had a baby by Alec, and Alec had buggered off.
But he'd only know it in some intellectual way, not really, right down inside himself. Tess was still his little girl, who lived in the shadow of the chapel of St Catherine, patron saint of spinsters.
He used to tease both his daughters about that, my poor father.
No wonder Tess was fucking Alec right from the age of fourteen and sometimes in the Old Mill itself, at dead of night, when my father was asleep, dreaming of his swans and their big, ungainly bodies which he handled so carefully you'd think he was carrying his own children instead of birds.
Tess wouldn't let him touch her any more.
And, as she grew into a more and more beautiful swan, I stayed the ugly duckling. I was glad of my father's attentions â but as Tess grew away from him, and the invisible (to him) Pill Diary on the bathroom wall kept cyclically repeating itself, he became more distracted and absent-minded, so I sometimes wondered if he saw me at all.
Tess was living by now in a council flat in East Coker. Alec was still around, then.
My mother went to see her and said she was well. And my father's lip turned down, as if he were going to burst out crying in front of us all.
He couldn't say it, but he knew his daughter had been seduced by a bounder.
There was no language any more to say that kind of thing.
The Pill had taken away innocence, and so seduction was dead.
But, as I'm telling this poor baby, granddaughter of Tess, all that is completely untrue.
You remember I told you about the invention of machines?
And how the washing machine, and the tumble dryer, and the dishwasher, and the automatic timer on the oven, were supposed to liberate women? Along with the Pill, of course. Give them choice?
Yes. This freedom, this sudden âchoice' only succeeded in removing any possible moral reasons for men to take the consequences for their actions.
Tess had made her own choice, right?
OK. Maybe she forgot to take the Pill one night. But how can Alec be to blame, when, seeing a pal who has a buddy who knows a guy in ⦠yes, in Detroit of all places, he decides, before the baby is even born, to go off there?
It was her decision, wasn't it?
So Tess is now in that new and flourishing category, the single parent.
And maybe the worst of the whole shameful situation is that my father just can't bear her any more. He spends more and more time at the seven pens at the swannery, trying not to look at those unselected cygnets that drown in the Fleet because there just isn't room in the world for them. And Tess's baby â a funny little thing, as Mrs Hands, the schoolteacher, said when it was time for her to go to school â a funny little thing with none of her mother Tess's looks â that was your mother, my poor child. We called her Mary, after our own mother, Mary Hewitt â maybe we hoped some of our mother's new power would come down to her. But there wasn't much sign of it, I'm sorry to say. She was just a baby â with all the crying-through-the-night and teething problems you could possibly wish for.