This entire train of thought was enough to make him open his copy of James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’, where there was a long account of individual trees which had a special affinity or relationship with particular humans, the tree being dependent on the man, and vice-versa; thus, when the man died, the tree sympathetically withered away, and likewise, when the tree perished, the man fell into a mortal decline. A passage in the same chapter concerned the rituals employed by primitive peoples to propitiate tree spirits, and made him ponder the Mayday customs practised in the English countryside, in which young women fetched branches laden with white blossom from the woods and copses and paraded around the parish. In the opening pages of his novel ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, he had described such a village procession – each woman clad in a white frock, holding a bunch of white flowers in her left hand, and a peeled willow wand in her right. Thus Tess herself, with her mobile mouth and innocent eyes, had been introduced to the reader. Had that immemorial custom – now, sadly, dying out – once been about the propitiation of tree spirits?
Frazer also wrote of trees as the temporary resting places of wandering spirits. Such, apparently, was the belief of ‘the inhabitants of Siaoo, an East Indian Island’, and of ‘the people of Nias’. The spirits moved around at will, taking up residence within individual trees (‘on the Tanga coast of East Africa’, mischievous spirits particularly liked to live in giant baobab trees). ‘Instead of regarding each tree as a living and conscious being,’ wrote Frazer, ‘man now sees in it merely a lifeless, inert mass, tenanted for a longer or shorter time by a supernatural being …’ The idea, at least in his own mind, readily connected itself to a somewhat different but related notion, one which he had originally found in Shelley: that for each man there is an ideal though unattainable female spirit, a restless creature that does not reside permanently in any one shape, but moves freely from one woman to another.
It was in the form of Gertie Bugler that his own ideal spirit currently seemed to have taken up residence. Often, in this changeable winter weather, he became abstracted in thoughts of where she was at a particular moment. He saw her in a small, low-ceilinged bedroom; saw her slowly undressing, one foot resting on the seat of a willow chair; saw her in a white petticoat and bodice, in the languid act of unclipping a stocking, rolling it down the sculptured curve of her leg, while sending a quick, sidelong glance in his direction. Her breasts rose and fell, and her hair, lush and heavy, shone like varnish in the candlelight. Several times he contemplated paying her a visit in Beaminster, but could think of no good excuse for doing so.
PART THREE
CHAPTER VII
I wake with frozen feet. The room is cold, and the prospect of the day ahead, a day like every other day, a day of filing papers, answering correspondence, fighting to stay warm and longing to be elsewhere, daunts me. Immediately I begin to talk to myself. Look at the insides of the window panes, covered in frost flakes! Please, feel the tip of my nose!
One of the maids knocks on Thomas’s bedroom door and Wessie, who sleeps by Thomas’s bed, or on it, begins to bark; whereupon the other maid hurries into my bedroom with the tea, sets it down and leaves in a fearful rush. They are such foolish things; we have this game every morning. It is quite unnecessary for them to be frightened of little Wessie, who is only saying good morning in his doggy way.
I put on my dressing gown, light a lamp, and pour out two cups of tea. I carry one through to Thomas and ask him whether he has slept well. He nods, but does not ask me whether I slept well. He always sleeps well while I, even when I seem to sleep, do not sleep well. It is far too cold to sleep well; even if I were to sleep, I should wake up exhausted. I used to sleep well, so well, as well as a child, I would sleep all night and wake fresh as a daisy, but now I never do. I wake exhausted, hauled from a pit, haunted by the shadows of dreams I can no longer remember. Is anyone listening to my complaint? This is not a comedy. The sentences come and go, and repeat themselves.
I hurry to dress. I put on a thick vest, which feels damp and smells of mould, followed by a blouse, three jumpers, woollen stockings and a heavy tweed skirt, which also smells mouldy. Downstairs I add a coat, fur-lined boots and my fur stole, and in this swaddled fashion I venture outside. It is the dead of winter, the air is alive with cold, the ground blue with frost, the wind blowing from the north; I give the hens twice as much grain as I did in the autumn.
I watch my husband walk down the drive with Wessie. Once he is safely out of sight, I hurry indoors and up the stairs. I push open the door of his study.
Six mornings ago, I slipped in here and glanced over his desk. I was looking for a poem about Wessie that he told me he had been writing: a slipshod piece of work, he said, not a success, not worth keeping. I thought to myself, it cannot be so very bad, I shall encourage him to finish it. Instead my eyes lit upon verses that he had written to Gertrude Bugler. She was not mentioned by name but they described her bewitching eyes, her coral lips, her raven hair. (I should like to cut off her raven hair.)
It was a love poem. It put forward the idea of his love for her and her love for him as that of two fiery stars linked by magnetic force, spinning for eternity through the darkness of space. Ridiculous! But this was a fair copy, beneath it I found earlier drafts. He must have worked on the poem for hours and hours.
Since then I have found four other love poems, and it is possible that in the heaps of scattered papers there are many more that I have not found. Four is quite enough, however. In one, he writes of eloping with her. He! Eloping? At his age? He is eighty-four! It would be comic if it were not so sad, so undignified, so unpleasant, so unworthy.
This morning another neat poem awaits me, without any attempt at concealment (has he left it out on purpose?). He is a spirit impatiently waiting for her to die so that they may sink together into the gloom of the underworld. What of her husband, may I ask? What part does the mysterious Captain Bugler play in this charade? And what of me? But this is how he must have spent the whole of yesterday, this is how I am rewarded for so many years of devotion and love. It is all I can do not to tear the poem to shreds. No doubt even now, as he wanders in the garden, he is meditating more poetic effusions to his dark lady.
It is an open betrayal. No, it is more than that. Each moment spent composing these poems, allowing his mind to move around her person, allowing her person to fill his mind, is a humiliating betrayal of our marriage. Does he dream of her? I have had enough trying to contend with his first wife and now there is this infatuation. O, Thomas! Can you not see what you are doing to me? Can you – you who are supposed to be such a keen reader of the human heart – not see how the heart of your own wife is breaking?
Once upon a time I might have been able to confront him, but years of living here have left me so short of confidence that I hardly know how I would manage. No doubt if I were to say anything, he would tell me that I should not have been looking at his papers. Yet I am his wife!
Silence is my answer. I shall fight fire with fire. Through the medium of silence, not speech, I am resolved to communicate my feelings.
Thus at breakfast I refuse to utter a word. I do not even give him good morning. I drink my coffee and eat a piece of toast, though in my mouth it tastes like dust, and wait for him to speak. To my astonishment, he eventually clears his throat.
‘Do we have any visitors today?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
‘We have had no visitors for twelve days.’
‘It is winter. People never want to visit in winter.’
‘Thomas, we never invite them. That is why they never visit! If we invited them, they would visit! Why don’t we invite Barrie?’
‘Barrie hardly ever leaves London. I know he came to “Tess”, but he hates leaving London in winter. He wouldn’t come.’
‘How do we know unless we invite him? He might like to be invited, at least.’
‘We should invite Mrs. Bugler here sometime.’
&nb
sp; ‘I see no reason to invite her,’ I reply, but my voice is barely audible and he does not hear. He inclines his head. In my irritation I fairly bellow at him: ‘I see no reason to invite her!’
‘I merely thought you would like the company,’ is his response. What deviousness! How cunning! How shameful! How dare he!
And then he leaves, as he always leaves.
The silence remains. I rise and open the kitchen door, whereupon a hot fug of marmalade steam hits me in the face. Standing by the black range, and with a long wooden jam paddle in one hand, Mrs. Simmons turns her heavy face on me. She does not like me coming in the kitchen; it is her province, according to etiquette.
‘O, Mrs. Simmons,’ I say, awkwardly (why is everything so difficult for me?), ‘I am very sorry to disturb you. I am looking for Nellie or Elsie.’
She shakes her head. ‘Not here, ma’am. They may be in the laundry room.’
I leave her, and search the laundry room. Neither of the maids is there. Nor are they in the scullery. I climb the stairs to the attic and come upon them in their room, hastily smoothing down the beds on which they have no doubt been lying and gossiping and talking about me.
‘When I was up in London, at the end of September, did Mr. Hardy have many visitors?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Did he have any visitors?’
‘I think Colonel Lawrence may have visited. And Mr. Tilley, ma’am.’
‘No one else? Did anyone stay?’
‘No ma’am. Not that I recall, ma’am.’
I look at Elsie.
‘No, ma’am,’ she manages.
‘You don’t remember either?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Do either of you remember whether Mrs. Bugler called?’
‘I don’t remember, ma’am. She may have done.’
‘May have done’: Nellie’s words, uttered in a casual tone, are another wound in my tired heart. Does she not understand how important this is?
‘Was it for tea, or another time of day?’
‘I don’t know, ma’am.’
‘But it was when I was in London?’
‘I think so, ma’am.’
‘Did she call more than once?’
‘I don’t know, ma’am.’
‘Well,’ I say. ‘Thank you, Nellie. O, and Nellie –’
‘Yes, ma’am?’
But for some reason I am unable to remember what I was going to say.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
I go down the stairs. Is it my imagination, or do I hear stifled giggles behind me? I know they think me half mad.
She is not beautiful. She is not even very handsome. Her bewitching eyes – what nonsense! She simpers and makes her eyes bigger for effect, but to say that they are bewitching is simply wrong. As for her hair, her long raven hair, I should like to wait until she was deep asleep and then steal up with a pair of garden-shears. Behold the mad witch-woman, shears in hand, tip-toeing towards her unsuspecting victim! Behold her as she slides a blade under the famous hair! A single chop should do the job. If she were shorn she would not look in the least handsome.
In the silence of this winter morning I stand in the hall and attempt to preserve the sense of my own existence. The clock ticks slowly, too slowly; the spaces stretch between each of the ticks, the glass shines and the furniture seems to watch me as if I were a stranger. It would not surprise me if the first wife, fat and haughty, hair piled in clods, were to waddle down the stairs and order me to leave, nor would it surprise me if Gertrude Bugler were to drift past with her baby on her breast. Such visions I ought to be able to kill at a stroke. I ought to be able to assert myself as mistress of the house, a person of some importance and influence in the world, a person in charge of my own destiny, and if it were not for the cold I truly think that I might succeed in doing so; after all, I am a woman who breathes and has blood in her veins, not like these spectres. Yet my connection to the present moment feels so utterly slender and tenuous that were I to scream at the very top of my voice it would make no difference; the sound would be akin to a stone thrown into a deep lake, a few silky ripples before the surface recomposed itself. What could change this? There are warm, loose silences, easy, comforting silences, even musical (I think of the hush of summer afternoons) silences that liberate the mind and allow it to take wing. This is not one of them; it has a taut, strained, chilling quality. It needs to be broken by some external force, say, the ring of the telephone. If someone were to ring, if someone were to ring for me, I should begin to live again, but no one ever seems to ring. People say that if one sufficiently desires something, if one directs one’s mind to a single end, one can force one’s desire into being. Ring, I tell the instrument; ring, please, I implore you. Is there no one in the whole world who would like to speak to me on any matter, however trifling?
I might stand here in the darkness all day and all night, glaring at the telephone and turning slowly to black stone like some woman in a fairy-tale under the spell of an evil enchantment, but I force myself into action. ‘Wessie! Wessie!’ I march round the house. As usual he is asleep in the drawing room. ‘Wessie! Off! Off! It is time for your brush. Come along, look sharp! Brush time!’ Reluctantly he obeys, toppling himself from the sofa and following me through the conservatory to the frosted side lawn. I brush him vigorously, and comb through the knots and tangles of his fur. ‘What’s this? What a mess! Where have you been, you naughty boy? You are in a state! O Wessie, what shall I do? Help me, please! What can I do?’
Were it not for Wessie, I should have no one to talk to. He is my true confidant. ‘Wessie,’ I say, ‘I am sure she visited. They sat together. They may have kissed. She may have allowed him to touch her, to fondle her, to stroke her hair, to unbutton her blouse, to run his dry hands up her leg. How disgusting, how reprehensible!’ (Even the word ‘fondle’ nauseates me). ‘He is an old man. Did you see them together? Did you? What did they do together? Did you hear them planning their elopement? Do you think he loves me at all? If he loved me, how could he possibly write like this?’ His sorrowful brown eyes gaze into mine. ‘O, Mistress,’ he seems to say, ‘I am so very sorry for you, I wish I could help, but, you know, I am only a little dog.’ – ‘O, Wessie,’ I reply, ‘you do help, you do, you do, you do,’ and I smother him in kisses.
Were it not for Wessie, I do believe, I should have died here. And yet sometimes, in spite of him, I feel as if I were dead already. Am I alive? Am I dead? Who am I speaking to like this? Will no one answer?
What is certain is that he would miss me if I were dead. On the day after my funeral, finding that there was no one to run the house, deal with the servants, lay out his clothes, help him dress, answer the post, read to him at night, cut his ancient toe-nails and soothe his worries, he would realise how much he has taken me for granted. Consumed by the ache of loneliness, he would take to his study and pour his grief and regret into a series of elegiac poems lingering on the time when he and I first met, dwelling on such details as the softness of my voice, the quality of my smile, the touch of my hand and the scent of my hair. Poems of true love, not of some paltry infatuation, they would be hailed by critics as his greatest achievement. In this way I should triumphantly displace both Gertrude and the first wife, although since I would be dead it is not a triumph that would afford me any satisfaction. O Florence, these are bitter thoughts and you are not a bitter person; you must not give yourself up to bitterness.
I return to the telephone. I speak to the woman at the exchange, giving Cockerell’s number in Cambridge, and to my utter relief, for I am desperate to unburden myself, he answers at once. ‘Sydney,’ I say, ‘Sydney, is that you? It is Florence here, I am so sorry to ring you so early.’
‘O?’ There is a catch in his voice. ‘Is something wrong? Is Thomas well?’
‘He is as he always is. I thought I should telephone to find out how you were.’
‘I am very well. How are you?’
‘It is fr
eezing here. I can hardly breathe for the cold.’
‘You sound upset.’
‘O – Sydney,’ I say. ‘I am so sorry to ring, but you have no idea what is happening. Things are even worse than they were. He is thinking of eloping with Mrs. Bugler!’
‘What! Great Heavens!’
‘I know, I know. It is terrible.’ For fear that the maids may overhear, I cup a hand to my mouth, turn to the wall, speak in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘He has written a poem about it! I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have bothered you, but I had to speak to someone. I feel so utterly crushed!’
‘Are you sure? With Mrs. Bugler! Where are they planning to elope to?’
‘I told you that he was infatuated, but I never expected this. He is eighty-four! Sydney? Are you there?’
‘Yes.’ Cockerell sounds rather remote. ‘How curious.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It doesn’t strike me as eloping weather at the moment. Winter is not an ideal time to elope. The eloping season is generally late spring or early summer. He hasn’t packed a suitcase or anything, has he? Where are they thinking of going?’
Is he laughing at me? Is he amused? There is a definite undertone of amusement in his voice. Or is it that he doesn’t believe me?
‘Sydney, I am not making this up. He has written dozens of love poems to her! I have no idea what to do. It is beyond me. They are planning to meet at a place called Toller Down Gate.’
‘That exists, does it? It’s a real place.’
‘Yes! Of course it exists! It’s in the middle of Dorset.’
‘Does the poem say how he proposes to get there?’
There is a substantial silence. He does not believe me.
‘Hallo? Florence? Has he done anything about the trees?’
Winter Page 15