Tess (24 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
Liza-Lu starves, in the days between the Dorchester and Weymouth shows. She becomes confused, vague.
Hardy is on the verge of madness himself. His last love is his best love â it's all coming true! They'll be in London together!
The fatal combination of Liza-Lu's famine-induced vagueness and Thomas Hardy's ever-mounting passion produce the worst scandal of all, on the night of 9th December in that elegant seaside town where mad George III loved to be lowered from his bathing machine into the water. Dorset buzzes with the news; and Sir Sydney Cockerell, who comes to stay at Max Gate some weeks later, sees the effect it is having on Florence; he takes the news post-haste back to London.
Florence begins to decide to take action.
The milkman comes late to the Mill today. His little red and white float moves silently along the lane and stops at Ella's mum's â as the house is known by the local kids, though I believe the Estate call it âFootsteps' or something whimsy like that â it helps with the summer letting, when Ella and her mum have to move out and go to the caravan site. Even looking down at the milk bottles, gleaming white and pure in the sun, makes me afraid, guilty, suspicious. Why is young John (he's from Weymouth, no one around here has got to know him properly yet) running three or four hours behind schedule? Is there a hold-up on the road, due to traffic piling up at the scene of the accident?
The accident, all those years ago, in the shallow pit behind West Bay, where the Chesil Beach gravel is small as peas and the lorries are due today to take it off for building work. The accident that was no accident at all and will soon be â or already has been? â seen as a crime.
Your grandmother Tess, my poor baby, has been away all those years. Thirty years almost to the day since the shallow grave was filled in, and the coastline has been rising in the calamitous new climate ever since; but even in the worst storms never quite coming near enough to disturb that unusual depression in the land.
A lifetime has gone by, since Tess and I sat on Chesil Beach together and ran our fingers through the stones, still searching unconsciously like children for the gold ingots washed up there from the Spanish Armada, or for the brittle bones of a merman, stranded ashore, in the days when people believed that man and Nature were all one and transmuted into each other, and that humankind was made up of humours, sanguine, choleric, melancholic.
If we were there today, we'd have no need to speak as we handled, fondled the smooth stones bigger here than at West Bay, no need to talk of the game Alec made us play, all those years ago. We'd hold up a stone â and in our mind's eye we'd see the wet stain from Tess spread on the fine veins, turning pale grey to a dark sea blue. We'd know how the story began, with the stone.
Tess will come back later today. What will she say when she sees you? Where will we all be by nightfall? The milkman looks up at our house as he places two pints on the step, and already I feel he's a messenger appointed to tell us the news I've dreaded to hear for so long.
He whistles and turns away from the step, though â and Ella runs over from her mother's sad house, which always has washing on a line and cheap curtains drawn in the best of weather.
Ella is happy to see us. She wants to know where we've been. And I tell her: we've been seeing the story of the beginnings of Tess.
And now, I say, you shall hear how Thomas Hardy lost his last, great love. But not before he had (poetically, metaphorically) legalized the union â made it official that the ballad of Tess should be sung through the female of the species â until the balance of Nature is set right and we and the planet are saved.
The cold twins of Europe â that is how a great anthropologist sees the cause of the plight the globe and humanity now find themselves in: the cold, rational deadly twins, exactly balancing one another, going out into the world, dominating, destroying, forcing the unnatural faith. Nowhere else but Europe developed the doctrine of equal measurement, which in turn leads to the concept of superiority and inferiority: one race over another, one sex âbetter' than another, the âblight of male domination'.
The cold twins of Europe went to the continents of South America and the jungles and plains of Asia, and scourged and killed until they were obeyed. Peoples who had always known (as we
know, the three of us, sitting under the fig tree at Abbotsbury, waiting for the crunch of the boots, the icy interrogation) â peoples of other cultures had always known that the pull and push, the constant change and mutation of men and women, nature and beast, kept the earth rolling on its axis â that a rigid system, such as that which came out of Europe and spread over North America, would kill us all in the end.
They were right, and many millions of living beings â man, woman and beast â have died at the hands of the cold twins.
Now we must find the strength to convert â if necessary, to kill â the enemy of the natural balance of Earth, before it is too late.
The daughters of the poisonous ballad of Tess must fight to evade the cold twins, as they come, dressed in the costume of Fate, to claim their next victim.
But the twins rule still with a rod of iron â and many women obey them without knowing that this is what they do. Poor Florence is one of the women of the cold twins. It's not her fault that she set out to ruin the prospects and career of another woman. (The twins like this, for one woman to pitch against another leaves the double-headed monster the throne all to himself.) And Gertrude, too â she had no idea of the trouble she caused, because she saw only with the eyes of social convention, and social convention is laid down by the twins.
9th December, Weymouth
Liza-Lu, little Miss A. Bugler â who plays the part of Liza-Lu â after the two sittings of Hollywood
Tess
at the Bridport Majestic she has allowed herself for the day (one right in the middle of dinner-time, so her mother, more frantic still with anxiety at her daughter's aetiolated form, nearly goes mad hunting for the girl, a
slice of apple pie in her hand) â Liza-Lu arrives at the theatre with only twenty minutes to go before curtain up. Gertrude, who needs her both for fastening her stays and for moral support, is flustered by her little sister's faraway expression and fumbling, pudgy fingers. She pushes her aside and struggles with the hooks and eyes herself. She hardly has time for make-up. A natural beauty â fresh-faced, glowing with a poetic, haunting quality unseen before â so says Sir James Barrie, lord of Fantasy, Poetic Haunting qualities and the whole gamut â Gertrude walks on stage and feels the hush, the faint orgasmic sigh she is already finding addictive, as it rises from the audience.
My God! She's beautiful! And so touching, so sincere, so truly and unmistakably Tess!
And isn't there a big rumour going round â the poet â no, not that one, silly, that's the butcher's father from Toller Porcorum â the one over there with the sad-looking lady, that must be his wife. Isn't there a lot of gossip that the writer Thomas Hardy, a figurehead for British art and letters, is so madly in love with his Tess that they've agreed to run off together?
Yes, Mary up at Max Gate who went into service there last month found the poem he's written to her â she said it was ⦠well, she didn't know where to look. Then the mistress came in and seized it off her, didden she?
The whispering stops. All eyes are on Tess. And then â to the astonishment of the audience â to the dumbstruck outrage of Florence Hardy â the author, poet and playwright rises from his seat and walks down the steps of the auditorium. He approaches the stage.
Oh God! A murmur, a multiple catching of breath ⦠the supreme embarrassment is more than the haberdasher's wife can stand and she lets out a shrill little scream.
Has Thomas Hardy gone senile? Or is his passion so great that he can no longer keep his hands off his creation, but must go on stage and ⦠and do what? Kiss her? Oh, my God, no, surely not ⦠or more, go further still â¦
This time an electric silence descends, like the air before the hurricane that sweeps over land, flattening, howling, shrieking in the broken timbers. Hardy mounts the stage and walks over to Gertrude Bugler. He takes her hand.
Gertrude falters and stops. Hardy looks into her eyes, pools of grief at the tragic fate that awaits her. He smiles gently and pulls the wedding-ring from her finger, slides it into his pocket and walks off the stage into the wings.
Coughing breaks out in the audience. December colds, held down by inhalations of balsam and the sucking of strong lemon and eucalyptus gums, now find a devilish release and echo round the draughty hall. The actors try vainly to regain control â the hurricane is unleashed â and it's only after the interval that a calmer atmosphere is restored.
Florence has to endure the interval, the famous old men who are friends of her husband carefully avoiding her eye as refreshments are passed round, but not as fast as the scandal â which she hears as it shrieks and moans in the rafters of the old hall.
She wants to kill Gertrude Bugler. She smiles as Barrie says he hopes they'll all dine together after the London Haymarket opening in the spring of
Tess
, with Gertrude in the starring role. She accepts graciously, she says she fears her husband may be made so terribly tired by the effort of travelling to London ⦠But of course he must come, Augustus John says, roguish, chuckling.
Where is Thomas Hardy? He's outside Gertrude's dressing-room, the dolt. Like any stage-door Johnny, too nervous to knock â and he fingers Gertrude's wedding-ring in his pocket as he stands there listening to Tess and Liza-Lu going at each other hammer and tongs.
â I'm sorry ⦠I truly am â¦
â You know I'm not married to Angel Clare in that scene â not yet â you reminded me to take it off in Dorchester, Annie!
â I promise it won't happen again â¦
Hardy listens outside the door to all this, with a smile like a schoolboy. The ring, the gold band Mr Bugler the farmer put on his
bride's finger, rests in his pocket. Gertrude will start agitating about it soon ⦠yes, there she is, asking little Miss Bugler to rescue it for her â¦
â I don't dare, Gertie. You get it yourself!
â I don't know where I'll find Mr Hardy when I'm on in a minute, the poor girl wails.
Hardy smirks, then goes faster than his eighty-four and a half years would normally allow, round a bend in the corridor and safely back into the stalls.
The bell rings. The audience, thirsty for blood, longing for a full-scale scandal to be enacted on stage, come noisily back to their seats.
Florence has to endure a husband, shrunk to gnome-size by his years, bouncing with a naughty happiness on the seat beside her. He hasn't finished â she can tell it â yet.
The wedding of Tess and Angel Clare. But no one looks at poor Dr E. W. Smerdon, as he plights his troth to the lovely Tess. They look at Thomas Hardy as he walks on stage with the ring and weds his Gertrude then and there.
The story ends badly â badly for both Florence and Gertrude, that is. Thomas Hardy gets on with his life and plans, and if he's heartbroken there's very little way of proving it. (At the death of Wessex at Christmas two years later, he certainly is; and he writes a moving poem to commemorate the most-loathed dog in literary circles.) But over the loss of Gertrude â or rather, the loss of his Tess â he seems oddly unworried at the idea of replacing her (with Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies) for the London run.
For this is what Florence did, and it sullied her name, even with the most polite of Hardy's biographers. It should be remembered,
however, that she was half insane then, with jealousy and misery, and some say the recompense she provided for the no-longer-so-young actress after Hardy's death merely added another dash of cruelty.
Sir Sydney Cockerell's journal tells us this:
10th January 1925. Max Gate received me very kindly, but there is a cloud over the house as TH is absorbed in Mrs Gertrude Bugler, the leading lady of the Dorchester Players, who has recently enacted Tess. FH [Florence] greatly disturbed about it. She says TH is offhand with her, a sorry business.
11th January. After breakfast a walk with FH and Wessie and she told me her troubles. He is eighty-four and a half and I begged her to try and look on the situation from outside as a comedy. She said that that was what she was trying to do, but that he spoke roughly to her and showed her that she was in the way â¦
12th January. Walked into Dorchester with FH in the morning. She told me she had been in such a fret in the night that she thought she would go mad. It was her birthday [forty-five] but he had not alluded to it in any way. She wondered if she could be in such a state of nerves on account of her age. All the company of players were talking about it. Mrs Bugler came to lunch to discuss a proposal from Frederick Harrison that she should play Tess at some matinées in the Haymarket. On the face of it there does not seem to be much harm in her. FH was very civil to her and offered to put her up for the New Century Club if she should be rehearsing in London. TH went through new scenes of
Tess
with her. FH had begged me to stay to make things easier, or I should have left in the morning.
After reading these excerpts from Sir Sydney Cockerell's journal, Mrs Bugler wrote to Cockerell forty years later in February 1964: âOh what a cloud there must have been at Max Gate! And I knew
nothing then of the “infatuation for the local Tess”. As I read those words a line from
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
came into my head: “It is in your own mind what you are angry at, Angel: it is not me.” It was only in the mind of FEH â¦'
Gertrude continues: âI well remember my visit to Max Gate on 12 January. Thomas Hardy was in a happy mood that day, and, as Mr Cockerell writes, Mrs Hardy was very civil to me; yet all the time I felt Mr Cockerell's cold disapproval and wondered how I could have offended him. And it is only now, after all these years, that I know he was defending Florence Hardy â or the Florence Hardy he thought her to be â from the woman he mistakenly thought me to be.
âA few days later there came a wire from Mrs Hardy: she was coming to Beaminster to see me. She arrived, terribly upset and agitated, and said at once that he must not know of her visit to me. Then I listened with incredulous amazement to what she had to say.
âShe concluded by asking me not to go to London. So I wrote to Frederick Harrison and to Thomas Hardy to that effect. I never saw Hardy again. His last words to me had been, “If anyone asks you if you knew Thomas Hardy, say, âYes, he was my friend'.”'
