Tess (10 page)

Following the Roman conquest the castle was still occupied for a decade or two by the survivors of the slaughter. Then, as the Roman presence became less aggressive and the army no longer an army of occupation as the country became absorbed into Romanism, the people moved out and north to the new town of Dorchester. The windblown soil filled the ditches, and grass regained the ramparts. Three hundred years later a group of heretics to the authorized religion, Christianity, built a small temple near the old east gate. There was a two-roomed house for a priest; four of them lie buried near the spot. Relics unearthed near the temple indicate a return to paganism – Minerva, Diana or Mars, or
perhaps all of them, the old pantheon of gods. The site was abandoned again. Then, a century later, near the temple, a strong Saxon was buried with his short sword and knife. Who or why is a mystery.

When Thomas Hardy wrote of the castle he described it as ‘an enormous, many-limbed organism of an antediluvian time substance, while revealing its contour'. It is not a particularly enlightening description, though much quoted. He also wrote that the castle had ‘an obtrusive personality that compels the sense to regard it and consider'.

When Tess and I got our last lift home from the fair at West Bay, we heard that our mother had taken a fall – somehow she had slipped into the millrace below the house. Just by chance a couple of farm labourers happened to be passing and fished her out.

We knew – at least Tess and I both knew – that you can't just slip over the high fence in our garden into the water below.

Our mother had lost her sanity because no one believed in the way she saw the world.

Tess had lost her sense of freedom – and of fun.

And it wasn't as if any specific change – recognizable to us, at least – took place in us.

Retty and I still jumped the stream, by the hidden place where we had said our secret names and made a blood sisterhood by scratching and holding wrists together, the wound made by Victor's penknife, itself a secret, satiny-sheathed thing we were never allowed to borrow and had to steal for the purpose.

The gash on the bark of the silver birch tree, made by Tess in rage when our father had ordered her to come in by ten in the late hay-making nights of midsummer and stop her night trips with Alec, across downs and under hedges, in pursuit of hare and rabbit, ghostly in the gloaming light of forbidden after-supper evenings, still grinned at us as it was growing dark, a malevolent black mouth midway up the trunk of the tree.

And our mother seemed to see us less and less, as if the changes taking place in us had rendered us most of the time invisible – though she, as we didn't know then, was changing too, drawn to the last stage of the Triple Muse, the stage of the Hag, as surely as Tess and I (not Retty, who stayed, as if bewitched, a young girl, a ‘maid' all her short life) were budding into the wild rose of midsummer, Beautiful Woman.

But all these things were unseen by us, too.

As for us, all the time we were being invaded – by blood that
sang out suddenly for union with another, for a bound into the future like the hare that Alec chased after with a sling and stones from Chesil Beach – we still played at hopscotch or begged for a ride on Farmer Beazer's pony, or knitted little strips of scarves for our teddies and then left them out in the dew to rot and lose colour by the summer's end.

The invasion wasn't so sudden. It crept up on us, took us insidiously, gradually – until, like the game of ‘scientists' on the shingle bank that late summer day, we had joined forces both: child, woman, man. Our game was one of the magical, secret games of childhood – but it was also rape.

I shall tell you, Ella – you who sleep now in the downstairs study in the truckle bed my father would lie on, when, increasingly, my mother refused him her bed (she wanted, I see now, to confront her loneliness and fear of insanity with a stoicism that was her downfall, for we must all join together at all times) – I shall tell you, Ella, of the waves of conquering peoples as they came to these shores like the waves of the sea, of

And their effect on women. Especially here: in England; and especially in Dorset, where Maiden Castle and Pilsdon Pen, as you have heard tell, were invaded by the Romans and the women raped and murdered like so many sheep by the invading troops.

First – as you have seen – the Celts were overcome by Caesar's army. And not without a great struggle and extraordinary courage on the part of the women. Boudicca, eager for instructions as to which direction to go in search of her enemy, released a hare from her skirts as augury.

As you, Tess, my sister Tess, did one evening after ratting in the
barn at Fred Bowditch's until the very last light – and then running across the fields – to find Alec had stoned a hare and captured it and it sat blind and bleeding on the ground beside him.

You gathered it up in your arms – I was there with you, Tess – and it seemed to lean back on you for a moment like a baby.

Then, suddenly, as you knelt and the hare was lifted tenderly into the folds of your skirt, the creature darted off. Right across the field until you couldn't see it in the shadows made by the night sky at the edge of our little wood.

Mended – magically healed. You did that, Tess.

You killed only after the extreme provocation you had to suffer.

As I say, invasions must not be seen as sudden happenings, complete in themselves and bearing their own successive history within them.

Like with Tess and Alec and Liza-Lu and Retty and Victor that summer, the changes were gradual.

The goddesses of the Celts changed slowly into the deities of the Romans.

The power of the women, already on the wane since the stencilling of the Giant and his acre-high phallus on the downs above Cerne Abbas, fell steeply, to concur with the absolute patriarchy of the Latin world.

Women became no more than possessions – of the father, the brothers, the husband.

When an invading people wishes to impose itself utterly, it brings clock, calendar and language.

All of these the Romans brought. Along with their architecture:
magnificent villas and temples to replace the simple, round, thatched huts of the country-loving Celts.

Yet, even after four hundred years – for this was how long they stayed here – they could never get the Celts to accept any of their innovations entirely.

Like women driven into an unwanted marriage, the Celts kept a part of themselves completely separate from their conquerors.

Yet how many have studied the effects of four hundred years of Roman law on the women of pre-Christian England?

Can we not see the effects on Tess?

For the end of that summer of ‘58 came – as it was bound to, though we, whose own calendar and body-clocks were changing just as rapidly as had the Celts' when their fortnight – and then their seven-day week, whose god was Dis – were overruled by the Roman pendulum – could hardly imagine it ever would.

We had to go back to school – we, who had passed the great barrier in life – and we had to rule straight lines in copy-books marked out in exact blue squares.

Five days after starting secondary school – which meant going into Weymouth on the bus – Tess entered menarche.

And I, as if I knew it would be the only part I would play in life, exactly two years later followed suit.

The Mill has two bedrooms on the ground floor, and the big long room with the millstone on the first floor, which opens out onto the garden that's hidden from the road. A long garden, with the fast brown stream running alongside and St Catherine's Chapel, like a broken-off tooth, standing high above it.

There's one more room – high up in the Mill – and from there you can see the sea on one side and the flank of the green hill with the chapel on the other.

It was there, on a Saturday in winter – the winter of 1961 – that Alec made me watch him and Tess doing it.

Retty and Victor were there, too. We'd climbed the creaking wooden steps to the room where my mother used to go to read – to escape from both of us and from my father with his endless talk of the Fleet and the rare tasselweed the birds come all the way up from the south to eat.

But today my mother is away, ‘visiting friends'. And my father has had to go to Bridport, to see a sick friend.

So we're alone, at the top of the Mill.

There's a round window in the room, which is on two levels; and the round window, as we reach the first level, seems to look down on us like a disapproving eye. The sea, which is its own special property (you can't see it from anywhere else in the house), floats like the grey iris of the eye, observing us – but uncaring really, as the sea always is.

Perhaps it's because of that marine, cold eye that Alec and Tess don't care either what they do, or who sees it.

Alec is pulling off Tess's pants on the bed as we climb the attic ladder to the second level of my mother's room.

Tess's legs swing upward and go round Alec's neck, like a pair of nutcrackers.

Retty and I draw in a breath; and as we do so the sweet, soft smell of the sea creeps in through the oriel window and slows the action, in the eye of the mind.

Retty starts to giggle. Alec's head, caught like that between Tess's legs, looks like the head of an infant to which she has just given birth. (Horribly prophetic, that. But it seemed funny at the time.) With her hand Tess pushes that surprised-looking head, with its red face and popping eyes, down and then down again until it seems to vanish inside her cunt.

Alec is sucking and lapping at Tess's sea.

Retty gets excited and puts a hand up my skirt, to where my pants are wet, too.

Then Tess pulls Alec's head away. She's holding it by a tuft of hair and for a moment it looks as if she's bitten the head off (
vagina dentata
, as the woman-haters, monks and misogynists, envisaged the fearful saw-toothed cunt of the forbidden woman) – or that, like Judith with the head of Holofernes, she is holding aloft the magnificent trophy of her revenge.

But then Alec is up and astride her. His cock is swollen and purple and Retty slides her hand right into my knickers. Slyly she enters me as Alec goes into Tess; and Tess's long shudder – of pleasure, of pain – seems in our half-drugged state to reverberate like the cry of a priestess in a sex initiation ceremony, in a sacred grove, deep under the ground.

For the shudder – the moan – is something we have never heard before and yet is instantly recognizable to us. The cry of woman – in ecstasy, in the agony of giving birth – one and the same, terrifying, strange and yet familiar to us.

Tess's moan, which stopped us entirely from hearing my father back from Bridport early, as he climbed those creaking stairs and came in to see us there.