Tess (26 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
And all the while, Tess sang. Protest songs. Sad rural ballads. Slave songs, longings for the freedom she had taken from her own mother so as to have the freedom to travel the circuit and send her plangent, eerie songs into the heart of every man, woman and child who heard them.
But that's how it has always been. One woman will exploit another, in order to get what she wants.
One day â the child would have been about five years old by then, it was 1969 â Tess took me along to a gig in a park at a stately home, Minterne Magna, I think it was.
And there he was. I'll always remember him, standing on a little bridge that looked like it was in the last stages of rotting away, a bridge over a great stagnant lake where the necklaces of acid green weed would drag you down and drown you before a friend could give you a helping hand to climb out.
He was playing the guitar. Well, he would be, wouldn't he? He'd come with his group.
His name was Gabriel Bell. Or so he said. Maybe it was just his name in the group; it didn't really matter which, in those days.
Gabriel, the new Angel, to make Tess's life complete.
And right then and there Tess fell in love with him â and so did poor silly Retty, who'd come along even though her mother didn't want her getting in with druggy folk at concerts.
They fell in love with his blond hair. Angel the Angle. (If little Miss A. Bugler, Gertrude's sister with my part, the part of Liza-Lu in the play, had been there, she'd have fallen for him too. He was just as beautiful as the film star Conrad Nagel (in itself an anagram of Angel, as little Miss Bugler, writing it out again and again in her
pre-pubescent passion on the lined pages of her exercise book, would have been well aware).)
Gabriel on the bridge, over the bright green pre-Raphaelite weed that just invited a young damsel to run to his arms and drown like Ophelia in its garlands before he could reach out and rescue her.
As Retty did drown, from the sheer misery of not being loved by Gabriel Bell of The Elastic Heavenly Band (for so they called themselves).
Oh no, Gabriel wasn't âinto' rescuing anyone, not even Tess.
It was the first time we'd seen a member of the tribe: one of the men who look like children's Bible Lord-is-my-Shepherd types. With their long sixties yellow curls, their crooks, their robes, their mantras, their caftans and beads.
The new man, the new Heavenly Light, who will lead you by the hand â away from macho, dishonest, unreconstructed men â like Alec, for example.
The peaceful man, the man with good karma, the sheep in sheep's clothing. He will love your baby, too!
The story will never be played out again! For the first time since the days of Thomas Hardy, everything has changed.
The sixties are here! The sitar whines in the apple meadows so loud that old Mr Warren claps his hands over his ears.
The Pill means no man can take advantage of you.
We are all free!
Tess sang with the band. Oh, it was lovely, you'll never know what a lovely voice she had.
They had just been waiting for each other â that's what everyone said.
Tess with her dark beauty, the Spanish blood that came from the ancient invaders of Cornwall, washed into her newly found voice too, along with the gravelly sound of the shingle rubbed by the sea on Chesil Beach.
Gabriel the invading fair-haired Saxon, with the eyes of Luftwaffe blue. The dogs â lurchers, Irish setters, wolfhounds â he had always round him; the medieval doublet and hose he wore when he sang his tormented lyrics of love and loss; the jewel colours, the red wine in the goblet; the illuminated manuscript he seemed to have walked straight out of, to climb high into Tess's tower and grab her awake.
It was all new. It was too good to be true. (And Retty, handmaiden to the band, glorified groupie by virtue of being a childhood friend of Gabriel's âlady', was tossed a bone from time to time, like Gabriel's noble pack of hounds: she could soap him in the bath when Tess was on her way over from the Mill (he stayed at B & Bs, he stayed in hotels, he dossed down with âmates' he'd met at the gig the night before).)
After she'd pushed the loofah up and down his long, fair, rippling back, Retty would feel so horny she'd go and have a fuck with Mick the drummer â or anyone, for that matter, whom she happened to bump into on her way down from the exquisite pain of polishing the pectorals of Gabriel Bell.
Everyone was in love with Gabriel.
Except for one person, of course â as the fairy tales always have it, there has to be an impediment: a wicked stepmother, seven steep hills, a fierce animal that will chew you up if you don't know the magic word to let you by.
Our mother Mary, she was the one who voiced her doubts about Gabriel Bell.
Why don't you bring him home?
What did you say he
really
does for a living?
Doesn't he have a girlfriend already in Bridport? Annie Bowditch saw him walking arm in arm with that girl you were at Mrs Moores' with for one term â Dolly â
Doesn't he have anywhere to live?
And in those arrogant, far-off days when a new race of happy, sexually tolerant, tall, beautiful superbeings had come into a dreamy little island still stiff with class prejudice and boring beliefs â Tess could say, with a shake of her head:
â It's not
like
that, Ma!
Poor Tess! But she wasn't the only one â I was impressed too with the new wind that blew the old mist away, along with a strong smell of cannabis and patchouli. And Retty, starry-eyed Retty, believed it, too (Gabriel would always look after her, he said. You're a good chick, Retty. Hey, the band'll take you along, anytime, anywhere in the world).
Our mother was right, of course â but how she had changed since the day she left the Mill and went her own way. She could âsee' still, but she was tied down, she was itching to go: we should have been able to realize that.
Mary sacrificed herself for Tess's baby â no wonder she suspected the fact that Tess, so happy now, so radiant, glowing with love for the leader of the pack, had never once brought Gabriel home to the Mill. She suspected that Tess hadn't told the Angel who had come to save her, the basic fact of her life â
Again, our mother Mary was right. Tess never told Gabriel she had a child.
We're sitting outside the Admiral Nelson pub just near the cottage where Thomas Hardy was born. Late summer tourists are flicking through brochures at the next table. Over Gabriel's shoulder I glimpse, just for a second, the brooding profile in a photograph of Thomas Hardy, the white line of his heavy moustache. The tourists, who are Scandinavian, are staring with awe at the face of the writer, poet and dramatist: then they look across at the hills, and they drink up, and then someone suggests a cider, they all want to have the âWessex experience', and a girl with a backpack and a serious look goes into the pub and comes out with mugs of scrumpy.
It's to the sound of the tourists gulping the thin, sour apple wine that I remember Tess actually trying to tell Gabriel about the baby â your mother, Baby Tess, your poor mother â and I remember too that Gabriel was very full of the coming gig that night.
At Wool Manor. Where else?
â You can come on stage this time, Liza-Lu, Gabriel says to me and he laughs out loud at the way I glow with love for him, when he says that.
And all the people in the pub garden look at Gabriel when he laughs like that â and their faces light up, as if he's taken the strain of ordinary, everyday life away from them and replaced it with magic. A couple of girls squeak in recognition â they're scrabbling for paper, or the back of an old cigarette packet, or a pub napkin, and when they find something he can sign his autograph on, they come up to him and they bend low over him, so his blond, long curly hair swishes right up against their tits.
Tess is used to this kind of thing. She's Gabriel's âold woman', he doesn't fuck the groupies, everything is cool. So she carries on saying what she was saying, anyway, and as the girls pull back and prance off with their arses rolling like pennies spewed out from a slot machine on a numbers game at the funfair, Tess tells Gabriel what our mother has told her she
must
tell him (and if she doesn't, that's it with Mary looking after the baby. It's Tess's responsibility too, for God's sake, and if she's really going steady with this Gabriel Bell, then the two of them ought to be thinking of where to settle down and bring up the kid respectably, like other people).
â My little kid, Tess is saying to Gabriel, my little girl.
There's just a split second of silence before Gabriel says, Great, how great, and bring her along to the gig tonight, babe. I'll look after the kid while you're on. Just a split second of a silence as intense as the grave â and a look at Tess that spells it all out: he won't get caught this way. And then the laughter's going again, and Dave the manager comes bobbing across the grass and throws his arms in the air and says, Shit, man! I've been looking for you everywhere â¦
And as we all walk off to the trailer, and I climb in proudly with
the star Gabriel Bell, I feel for the second time a silence, and it comes from Tess.
â The pigs stopped me, said I was speeding on the road to Dorchester. This is Dave talking, Tess unaccountably gone all still and sad.
â They asked me my name. I told 'em my name and they wrote it down. Dave is convulsed with laughter now. Tess stares straight ahead at the road that takes us east, to Wellbridge, as Hardy called the lovely old house, Wool Manor.
I could swear I heard a cock crow as we slowed to leave the main road and go into the lanes that lead to Winfrith Newburgh and East Stoke.
An afternoon cock crowed, as we drove much too fast through the dazzle of cow parsley and high box hedge. Retty, sitting in the back of the trailer, stripped to the waist and swinging her breasts so Gabriel could see them in the driving mirror and go even faster round the corners, brake dramatically at the sight of an oncoming car â squealed and shouted above the roar of the engine that it was bad luck, so her old grandma used to say, bad luck to come if a cock was heard to crow after noon.
But Dave and Gabriel are laughing, rolling joints â Dave tells us what he said to the pig who stopped him on the motorway.
â I'm Sergeant Pepper, Dave said he told the cop â and how they laughed!
In those days I used to go and see our father although I didn't tell our mother Mary â or Tess, for that matter.
He lived in a little hut, a boathouse, I suppose you could call it, except there was no boat, just a room for sick swans right on the
edge of the water and a simple dwelling next to it where he slept, and cooked on an electric ring, and read his books on birds at night, with the sound of the heavy swans settling down for the night in their high nests of twigs, all round him.
My father had almost entirely disappeared from human society. He cycled into Abbotsbury from time to time and came back with a few provisions. But he spoke to nobody, except in the most taciturn way, and if people asked him details about mute nesting swans he would shake his head as if he'd gone mute himself.
Sometimes he'd take a walk in the tropical gardens, and he'd go through all the dense foliage and the spindly high trees with their strange, exuberant blossoms and fruit that could never ripen, and fetch up in the green sward where people buried their pets long ago. I used to find him there, standing by the little headstones deep in thought; and by the stone marked TESS he'd stand like a mourning owner, as if he was listening in his mind to the poem Hardy wrote for Wessex after he was dead and gone.
The most important thing in my father's life had let him down. His daughter had disappeared, in the guise that he would have liked her to remain for ever â young, beautiful and his. He needed her to be obedient, to run and trot when he called. Now she had brought her litter to his home and he preferred to sulk down by the water's edge, where the legs of the flamingos were like moving trees in the brackish water.
And besides, our mother had nothing left to say to him. It was a sad business, really.
But we none of us knew, then, where the real truth of the matter lay.
Tess was preoccupied with her grief. If she hadn't seen it coming â well, everyone else had.
It was to do with responsibility â an unfathomable word then. Alec hadn't wanted the responsibility of looking after your poor mother, little Tess. Gabriel wouldn't like to âsettle down' either. So â although you could never be quite sure what lay behind it (Gabriel was good at protesting total innocence, Retty's mother,
sobbing, called him a âshit who's learned how to be a blameless shit') â what took place that night at the gig at Wool Manor was only too predictable.
That silence, the silence Tess heard like a cold wind down the centuries, the cold wind of betrayal, abandonment and loss of love â filled the parks and gardens, the tourist pavilions erected for the music festival, the old manor itself where ticket-paying guests were allowed to wander, to penetrate even as far as the bedroom with the four-poster where the yellow mistletoe used once to hang, memento of Tess and Angel Clare, and Hardy and the object of his last infatuation, the young Tess. The silence, with its underlying violence, blocked the sound system and made Tess's voice tiny and tinny, while Gabriel's guitar sounded like a child's mandolin.
The audience was disappointed. The stench of disappointment in love hung over Wellbridge; some said it was unlucky, with the memories of the evil, hook-nosed women in their portraits on the walls and Tess looking that night so like them, unflatteringly lit by whirling strobe lights that were jinxed that night, too, throwing her features into hideous shadows on the backcloth of the stage.
