Tess loses her baby too. I thought of that later. Tess isn’t allowed to give her baby a proper Christian burial, and I wasn’t either. The nurses took him away. There’s this idea that the soul doesn’t enter the body until the moment of birth – such nonsense! Afterwards, back home, I was very low for a long time; I lay in bed or sat in an armchair like an old woman. It sounds illogical, but I felt I’d let Ernest down. My mother fussed round me, and baked and tidied, and tried to cheer me up by being very bright and positive, saying that I was young and that Ernest and I would have many more chances to start a family, but I remember thinking, what if we don’t? What if that was our one and only chance? Oh and the skies were grey, the fields were muddy, winter was coming on. But then, one day, a car pulled up outside the cottage and there was a small man in a brown raincoat at the front door, and he gave me a bunch of red carnations, in a silver vase, and with them was a little envelope, and inside it a card which I still have. It reads, ‘My dear Gertrude, with best wishes for your speedy recovery, yours truly, T.H.’ I was so touched by that; I thought how good it was of him. He must have heard via Mr. Tilley. The card was written in his own hand, too.
It cheered me up no end, and I pulled myself together and got on with things, and by late summer I was pregnant again. The March after that I gave birth to Diana, which made me very happy.
I didn’t meet Mrs. Hardy again for a long while. Not until we were rehearsing for ‘Tess’, which was more than a year after our – whatever you call it. Our misunderstanding, to use her word. And she behaved as if nothing had ever happened. She was a little distant, but very polite. It was odd. I tried talking about the misunderstanding to Mr. Tilley, but he never liked being critical of anyone. ‘Mrs. Hardy means well, but she’s under a good deal of strain with her health,’ he said. ‘She’s not a robust woman. I wouldn’t pay too much attention if I were you.’ Ernest took a different line – he thought she was a bit doolally, which was one of his favourite words, and in the end I came to agree with him; there was an underlying instability in her makeup, I think.
As I remember it, she and Mr. Hardy only attended one or two rehearsals, and it’s true that she didn’t look well. She’d had an operation on her neck which she tried to hide with a fur stole, a dead fox, not that it fooled anyone; it drew attention to her neck rather than the reverse. Somehow the stole made her look even more lemur-like. I did my best to avoid her, but a while before ‘Tess’ opened I had an invitation from her to tea, which surprised me a great deal. Half of me didn’t want to go, but Ernest saw it as an olive branch and said that it was her way of trying to apologise; if I didn’t go it would be rude. So I went. But, and this struck me as very strange, I never saw her. She never appeared. Mr. Hardy told me she was unwell but I thought she had had cold feet and couldn’t face meeting me. Whatever the reason, I have to confess that I was very relieved! There was just Mr. Hardy and me and Wessex, and Wessex knew me by then, I was accepted, and he allowed me to feed him lots of sandwiches.
When there were other people around, or when he wrote to me, Mr. Hardy always addressed me as either Gertrude or Miss Bugler, or Mrs. Bugler after I was married. But when we were alone together it was always Gertie. He called me Gertie that day, and it was a very important day, because he told me about the possibility of putting on a professional production of ‘Tess’ at the Haymarket Theatre in London. As soon as he broached the subject I saw what was coming – I knew he was going to ask me if I wanted to play the part – and my heart began to beat a little faster. Dear me! It was a bit like being proposed to! He went on to say that nothing was settled, and it all depended on how well ‘Tess’ went in Dorchester and what the reviewers said, but I was very excited. When I left, I felt as if I was walking on air. I did worry a little about what Ernest would say when I broke the news to him, because I knew what a strain it would be for him looking after Diana when I was up in London, but he was good about it. He knew how much it meant to me, a chance to act on the professional stage.
‘Tess’ did go well in Dorchester, although in one performance – I think it may even have been the opening night – I nearly forgot to take off my wedding ring. At the last moment I remembered, and I gave it to Mr. Hardy for safe keeping, and he put it back on my hand just before the scene where I was married. The newspaper reviews were very nice, though the one in the ‘Daily Express’ made us all laugh. I still have it in my scrapbook. ‘No one could be more like Hardy’s heroine; she was attending to her manifold duties at her farm a few hours before she became Tess on the stage.’ Well, we had three fields and a herd of bullocks – not really a farm! But really that was my fault, because whenever I was asked what Ernest did, I always said he was a farmer.
The best moment, I think, was after the play had ended on the Saturday evening – we went into the Council Chamber and there were speeches, and a poem was recited in my honour. I felt very proud, but embarrassed, really. By then it was common knowledge about the Haymarket, though my parents still refused to believe it; to them it was a bit of a joke, I think. It’s hard to describe, but London used to occupy a strange place in the mentality of most people in Dorchester; if you even mentioned it they would recoil in horror, or they would say something like: ‘Well, it may be all right to visit for a day or two, but I couldn’t ever live there, not in all that smoke! I couldn’t breathe!’ No one country born and bred could be happy in London, was the general view. My mother had never been to London in her entire life, even though it was only two and a half hours on the train, and she couldn’t believe in the Haymarket. Even a good deal later, after I’d gone back to the Hardys’ and met the manager of the theatre, Mr. Harrison, she didn’t think it could be true.
I remember that day so well, even better than the first time I went to the house. Several of my visits there for tea have blurred in my memory, but this was lunch. Ernest drove me, and it was one of those horrible foggy days and I got there late and in quite a panic in case I was thought very rude. But everyone was so kind. We drank champagne, and Mr. Harrison told me that I’d be paid for playing Tess – twenty pounds a week! That was such a surprise, when I’d’ve done it for nothing! To be paid for acting! But staying in London was going to be expensive, so I was very pleased about that. We talked about all sorts of things – hotels and trains, and what the other members of the cast were like. Professor Sydney Cockerell was there – I’d met him before, because he’d come to see ‘Tess’ at the Corn Exchange – and we had a fascinating conversation about ghosts! Mr. Hardy was on very good form, too.
The only difficult moment came as I was leaving. I’d told a small lie, a white lie – I’d said that I had a taxi-cab waiting for me at the end of the drive, which I felt sounded better than to say it was Ernest in our old car, and then Mr. Hardy decided to walk me down the drive. He’d never walked me down the drive before, and I was quite taken aback because I thought I’d be found out, but the fog saved me. It was so foggy you couldn’t see very much at all. But, as we stood by the gate, just before I got into the car, he did say something very touching, the most touching thing he ever said to me. He said that I should always think of him as my friend. It was such a generous thing to say, and I felt very moved. To say it to someone like me! I shall never forget it. When I heard that speaker at the W.I. telling everyone that his character was cold and withdrawn, I went straight back to that moment in the fog and thought how she didn’t really know what he was like at all.
As I drove home with Ernest I was in a daze of happiness. I really believed it was the start of a big acting career, and that we would be able to escape Beaminster and live in London and – oh, everything would change. We would start a new life together, I would become famous. Ernest told me to steady on – ‘don’t count your chickens’, but I was already counting. For weeks I pushed little Diana in her pram up and down the steep Beaminster hills and dreamed about it all. It was very hard not to be carried away.
PART TWO
CHAPTER VI
One tranqu
il January morning, at a time not far removed from the present, the inhabitants of a certain region of the west of England awoke to find themselves submerged in a fog of such density that the entire world of meadows, fields, woods, rivers, towns and villages was reduced to a few yards of visibility. Such fogs, developing during the night and pouring their spongy masses over the land, vary greatly in their persistence; some clear rapidly, especially when assisted by a sufficiently strong breeze, while others take hours to disperse. To judge from the stillness of the air, it seemed likely that this particular miasma would last for the whole day.
In the midst of the fog, on a hill-top about a mile from a well-known county town, stood a handsome brick house enclosed by a belt of trees, from the branches and twigs of which droplets of water fell and made an irregular patter on the dead leaves. There were few other sounds, one characteristic of such vaporous weather being its muffling quality. Birds declined to sing, preferring to wait for better times, noises from any traffic on the nearby road were muted, and while the railway line was not that far away, even the whistle of a steam train was scarcely audible.
Such conditions create in the minds of those who experience them a powerful disorientation. Lacking familiar landmarks, travellers often lose not only their way but also their sense of time. Gazing towards the house, its slate roof receding into white obscurity, an innocent observer might easily imagine himself into some other age, not the early part of the twentieth century.
A door of the house opened, and out stepped an old man, who stood motionless on the gravel drive. From a distance, he seemed less a living human being than a spectre who had temporarily chosen to haunt the spot where he had once lived. The textures of the fog drained the substance from him so thoroughly that it might not have been surprising had he faded entirely from view. With him, and equally ghostly, was a dog, a white terrier.
The old man wore a long dark coat and a hat, and in one hand he carried a walking stick. His age was probably somewhere upwards of four score, and his face, with its pronounced nose and white moustache, as wrinkled as a prune. It was the face of one who had spent much of his life thinking and observing; in it were lineaments of shrewd wisdom, good humour, and grim resolve, yet it also held more than a little doubt. The sceptical expression that it bore at this moment perhaps owed something to his sentiments concerning fog, but also seemed to bespeak more generally his relation to the world.
Anyone seeing him there would have drawn the reasonable and entirely accurate conclusion that he was the owner of the house, who had come out in order to take the morning air and to give the dog a run in the garden.
He began to walk slowly down the drive, which was somewhat overgrown by trees, the low branches extending overhead to form a tunnel. The dog dawdled to inspect a particularly interesting stick and then trotted into a shrubbery.
After less than a hundred yards the old man reached the white barred gate which marked the edge of the property. Here the fog seemed even thicker than it was by the house, and nothing could be seen beyond the tufts of grass shining on the far side of the road. The road itself was one of some importance, but at this early hour few people were abroad; it lay still and empty, its surface covered in needles and cones, along with a liberal scattering of beech leaves which, despite the monochrome light, registered on the eye in glowing shades of gold and russet.
Presently there came the very faint sound of wheels, made by some waggon as it left the town and ascended the hill. The sound grew louder by degrees, and when the steady clop of a horse’s hooves could also be discerned the old man moved away and called the dog’s name several times. ‘Wessex. Wessex.’ His voice was not at all peremptory, and indeed there was something in the tone which suggested that he had no great expectation of being heard. When the dog did finally reappear, wagging his stumpy tail, he did so from a completely different direction to that which his master had anticipated. ‘Where have you been?’ the old man asked him. ‘Eh? Wessex?’
The waggon passed; silence prevailed once more. The old man took a thin path that threaded under the trees and led to a stretch of worm-cast lawn bordered by flower-beds. On it a fat rabbit was feeding. It vanished into the fog, but the dew on the grass was heavy, and its trail could be followed as far as the edge of the vegetable garden, an area of ground stocked with sprouts and other winter greens. The leaves of the sprouts had a blueish tinge in the fog, and fat pearls of water, condensed from the air, lay in the crinkled folds of the cabbage leaves. Snails with glistening horns oozed over the damp soil, smoothly negotiating its uneven surfaces.
The old man tapped the dog’s hind-quarters with his stick. ‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Rabbit. Rabbit!’
The vocabulary of the dog was an extensive one, in which the word ‘rabbit’ occupied a prominent place, and in times gone by he would have chased the thief from its dinner without more ado. Wessex was, however, now eleven years old – an age, in canine terms, perhaps not much less than that of his human master. He gave a start, sprang eagerly forward and rushed towards the looming form of a man bearing a spade.
‘Mornin’, sir,’ he said in a rich local accent. ‘Mornin’, Wessex.’
In a desire to be respectful he raised the handle of the spade to touch what would have been his forelock, had he possessed any hair, which he did not: his head was bald as an egg.
‘Good morning, Mr. Caddy,’ the old man replied. ‘A foggy morning.’
‘’Tis, sir, ’tis, the worst this year. In the town it be even thicker. Down there you can’t see your hand in front o’ your face, it be like a night without a moon.’
‘Will it clear, do you think?’
The gardener looked about him with a scientific air, as if to assess the peculiar quality of the fog. ‘It may do, possibly it may. Then again, it may not. If you asks me, sir, it don’t seem like it has a mind to clear, but then you never knows with fog. An hour from now it might have all gone, but I wouldn’t say so.’
When it came to matters meteorological, Mr. Caddy, like many a true countryman, was evidently unwilling to venture too decisively one way or the other. At his assessment of probabilities the old man seemed mildly amused. ‘There is a rabbit in the garden.’
‘Yes, sir, I seed it yesterday and I’ve been all around the walls a-lookin’ for where it might have got in. I can set a snare if you want, sir. Or I can borrow a gun. My wife’s brother has a gun, sir, I could borrow that.’
The old man shook his head. ‘No shooting, no. It may leave of its own accord. So long as there is only one of them.’
‘Yes, sir.’
They parted, the old man walking further round the shrouded garden. Again they came upon the rabbit, and this time Wessex gave pursuit, though never with any prospect of success. The old man patted him, however. ‘Well done. Well done, Wessex.’
Shortly afterwards both had returned into his house, while Mr. Caddy had also disappeared from view. The house was then as still as a photograph, the fog having closed over the scene so completely that it might never have taken place.
The morning continued. Far above, the sun doubtless shone with its customary brilliance from a sky as blue as those in the paintings of Raphael, but its rays penetrated the vapour only enough to diffuse a general whiteness. The old man, now seated at his desk, and with a woollen shawl around his shoulders, did not greatly mind, such fogs, like frost, ice and snow, being a familiar part of winter in the English countryside, and infinitely preferable to the acrid sepia versions of the same phenomenon found in the city. Indeed, he was grateful to the fog for hiding the distractions of the exterior world, leaving him free to concentrate on his writing.
The poem on which he was working was one he had begun some months earlier, when his wife, Florence, had been in London for an operation on her neck. It was an expression of Wessex’s love for his absent mistress, expressed in the dog’s own voice. Will she ever return, the lady of my heart, or is she gone for ever? Will I again hear the call of her soft voice? Will I again run
toward her as she stands at the field’s edge? Composition on such a theme should have been easy – the time was when he could have thrown it off in a trice – but the words had not come, and he had put it aside. Regarding it now he found it a clumsy affair, with the opening verse especially weak. Still, the idea was an appealing one and he was reluctant to abandon it, not least because Florence had been nagging him for years to write something about Wessex.
It was an unwritten rule that when he was in his study he should not be disturbed, but as he set to work she knocked on the door. Three guests were coming to luncheon, and she wanted to know whether champagne should be served. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘it is an important day.’
‘Yes,’ he said, turning slightly in his chair. (He liked champagne. It was his one luxury.)
There was a short silence in which her stiff face stared at him. She seemed badly out of sorts, he could tell; at breakfast she had said barely a word.
‘I’ve asked Mrs. Simmons to do a cherry cake for tea. And Thomas I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve told the maids to light the fires early. The drawing room is so damp in this weather, and the fires never seem to draw well. We must get the chimneys swept soon. We simply must. All the chimneys.’
Winter Page 11