Thinking of the scene with Florence, he realised that it was not yet over. Her decision to throw his poems on the fire would, he was sure, have left her in agonies of remorse.
He wished it were not so. When he and Florence had first met, at a time when his marriage to Emma had been afflicted by one of its deepest frosts, his soul had been warmed by her devotional looks and her solicitude. He had convinced himself that she was a careful reader who might in time come to understand some of the deeper mysteries of his art. There he had been wrong; like Emma, even more than Emma, she had continued to read a poem as if it was a scientific tract. She was like the lepidopterist; every word and phrase that left his pen she interpreted in a literal fashion as an account of his inner self. She did not begin to understand, although he had tried to tell her, that he was not I, and I was not he. The relationship between he and I was close; they were blood brothers, but brothers often differ greatly. When he wrote a poem in which he contemplated an elopement Gertie, it was nothing but a flower of desire.
Once again, he found himself thinking of Shelley’s theory of the ideal woman who has the ability to appear in numerous guises. It perfectly seemed to fit his own dealings with the opposite sex, in and out of fiction. Who, after all, was the she in the poems to whom he had here given the name of Gertie? Who the shes of the novels and short stories? Behind each stood one even more mysterious, more alluring: a woman’s shape veiled by shadow or mist, on the edges of vision, out of reach. If he tried to move towards her, she seemed to drift away.
His entire life had been spent seeking her, catching occasional glimpses of the same shape. During a sudden summer downpour near St. Pancras a slender girl in a fluffy blouse had taken shelter under his umbrella, and in the thick of winter he had recognised her again, stepping on to an omnibus that disappeared into the crowded Piccadilly dusk. Months passed, and she appeared on a woodland path, a freckle-faced village lass in a white smock reading a lover’s letter under the boughs, and then she too went her way without a word. In her next incarnation she was a dark gipsy with ringleted hair picking blackberries from an entangled hedgerow, lips stained purple from the ripe fruits that she had consumed like a goddess in one of Keats’s odes. Among these glimpses, of course, there was that of the dairymaid in the Stinsford water-meadows.
Of all such transitory visions, one held an especially strong hold on his imagination. As a boy of fifteen or sixteen he had been among hundreds of townsfolk who gathered to watch a hanging. It was late summer, and in the country that encircled the town the corn-fields were golden, but the day itself was one of heavy drizzle and a greying mist. The gallows had been erected outside the gates of the prison. Although he could not now remember whether he had been there by chance or deliberate intention, he remembered with great clarity the hour of the hanging and the murmur of excitement as the woman mounted the steps to the scaffold. She was not local, but had lived in a village in the west of the county, where she had been married to a man of no fixed trade or occupation. Her crime had been that of murder. Her unfaithful husband had come home drunk in the small hours, and when she reproached him he hit her with a horse-whip and kicked her hard; as he bent to untie his boots she split his skull with a hatchet. Some sections of local opinion felt sympathy for her and wondered whether she was guilty in the eyes of God, but others took a sterner view; at all events, the law had found her guilty and had determined that she should be put to death. Slight of build, with her hair pinned up, she was apparelled in a thin gown of black silk, and seemed so composed that she might almost have been some elegant woman of fashion there to admire the scenery from a new vantage point. Various figures attended to her dispatch, one tying her hands, another her feet, while the executioner, a thickset man with a big white beard, pulled a cloth bag over her head.
He was intensely interested, his consciousness alive to every detail of the occasion, which was not unlike that of a fair. Dogs and babies were present, and a good deal of lively conversation took place on matters entirely unrelated to the spectacle; very little of the respect that might have seemed appropriate was in evidence. Yet when the bolt finally slid back and the woman dropped, kicking and struggling at the rope’s end, it was a shock; bystanders gasped, and a boy who had scrambled into the branches of a tree for a better view lost his balance and fell with a sudden cry. The moment failed to last; the body ceased its convulsions, and then someone spoke, someone sighed, someone lit a cigarette; he heard the scrape of the match and the faint crackle of the tobacco strands in the damp air. Someone else, at a remark unknown, gave a quick giggle: he turned his head and saw a pantry girl squirming in the embrace of a fat, red-faced man in a tailor’s apron, and the man caught his eye and gave him a sly wink. Embarrassed, he looked back. The woman was now swaying to and fro with a graceful motion that reminded him of those tiny green caterpillars dangling from the branches of birch trees. Dazed, and disinclined to believe that he had seen what he had seen, the division of a human body and its spirit, he thought of the breeze, redolent with the scents of the fields and hedgerows over which it had passed in its invisible progress, now permeating the thin membrane wrapped around the corpse. The crowd slowly dispersed, but he stayed where he was – it was an hour before she would be cut down – and as the drizzle turned to rain, the tight black dress clung to her body and revealed her trim female shape, and the cloth bag adhered to her face and allowed her features to emerge for the last time.
Her name had been Martha. Martha … Tess … Gertie … he stared at the marks scratched by his pen. Ah, Gertie, Gertie. He dipped his pen in the ink-well, he turned the nib on the blotting paper and watched the ink spread through its fibres.
What should he do about her? He longed to see her on stage in London. Afterwards he would take her out to a fine restaurant – to the Savoy, no less – where they would drink champagne. Their glasses would clink, and he would toast her success, before escorting her back to her hotel. They would part in the foyer, beneath a glittering chandelier, and perhaps as they parted, she with a dazzling smile, he would give her the amber brooch.
Perhaps they would not part. Old as he was, and unlikely as it seemed, he refused to rule out the possibility of a romantic entanglement. Of one thing, at least, he was sure: that those philosophers who claimed that the passion of love was a matter that could be experienced in its fullness solely by the young, and in diminishing degree by those of more advanced years, were mistaken.
He opened the door softly. The stairs, the corridor, were empty.
Listening for Florence, he heard only the heavy tick of the grandfather clock in the hall and the muted calls of the wood pigeons in the trees. He floated down like the spectre he was, one soft step at a time, a precautionary hand on the banister.
He was putting on his coat when he met one of the maids.
‘Where is Mrs. Hardy?’
‘She is away, sir. She said if you asked to say she would be away all afternoon.’
He paused, considering. ‘In Dorchester?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘Did she say why?’
‘No, sir.’
Again a pause. ‘Thank you.’
The girl was leaving for the kitchen when he remembered something else. ‘Where is Wessex?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’
‘Is he in the house?’
‘I can’t say, sir. He may be in the garden, sir. Would you like me to look for him, sir?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I expect he’ll turn up. If you see him, keep him.’
‘Yes, sir.’
This uninformative exchange over, he opened the front door and stepped out.
A portion of shadow awaited; he crossed it, and through a tangle of branches the winter sun burst upon him. He stood transfixed, not moving, adjusting himself to the sharpness of the light. The air was cold enough to make his breaths visible, yet the old sun warmed his mottled skin like that of a snake. At times like these, it was easy to understand how the pagans who had li
ved here more than two thousand years ago had worshipped the sun as a deity.
The sound of a cough reached his ears, and he turned his head: Caddy was halfway up a ladder, pruning one of the apple trees.
He spoke to the man: ‘Have you seen Wessex lately?’
‘Not since the mornin’, sir. I seed them little rabbit again, sir, feedin’ in the vegetables.’
‘Ah. But still only one?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well. Mr. Caddy – if you have a moment, if you would put the hens away, before it gets too dark.’
He walked to the end of the drive and, a trifle dizzy, rested by the gate. The view extended over grey stubble fields broken by dark hedges. Above, the sky was cloudless, but not blue as in summer; instead its hue was that peculiar admixture of rosy-pink and violet characteristic of hard winter weather, with the violet deepening, and growing progressively more intense near the horizon, around which it lay in a dark, concentrated band of smoke. A bitter night with another hard frost lay ahead, and already parties of rooks were straggling towards the wood that since time immemorial had been their nocturnal place of rest. The wood was only lightly shot, and rooks from far afield lived here in the winter months, gathering at dusk and crowding together for safety. If one entered the wood shortly after nightfall, as the old man had sometimes done, one heard the entire flock engaged in a conversation composed of squawks and shrieks, as raucous as parrots in a menagerie.
More and more birds came over his head, in long black strings which crossed the fragments of a large moon, shadowy and insubstantial. Was this the last time that he would linger, watching these quiet fields? Was this his last winter, was today, even, his last day, his final hour? Ever since Gertie’s visit nearly a month ago he had had the sense of the approaching end, and standing here now he felt a certain sort of lightness in his body, as if without too much difficulty the northerly breeze might strengthen and, in a sudden gust, break his earthly moorings and carry him away.
The loud caws of the rooks receded, and in their place he was conscious of the distant puffing of a train as it gathered speed on the rise out of the town. It grew rapidly louder, for the line passed through a cutting no more than a quarter of a mile from the house itself. The sounds of such trains were part and parcel of life here, and not inherently unpleasant to him, but now he was made uneasy by the thought that Wessex might have strayed near the line. Years earlier, several of Emma’s much loved cats had met their end in just this way. One particular favourite had been cut in half, and the discovery of its severed body on the rail had been deeply upsetting. A cat was only a cat; were Wessex to die in a similarly tragic fashion, Florence would be pitched into an unspeakable hysteria. Work would become impossible.
The train drew nearer, and louder, and then it had passed, leaving behind a trail of white smoky puffs which rose and began to disintegrate. His apprehension remained, though it was not, in truth, very great, and as he was walking back Wessex appeared from the skirts of the shrubbery. Grizzled, and a little stiff in the hind-quarters, but still very game, the dog seemed to stare as though puzzled as to his whereabouts, before identifying his master. He trotted over, tail twitching. Wessex, thought the old man: my friend, my ally. He could trust Wessex. He bent and stroked the dog, who promptly rolled on to his back.
An hour later, and he was again in his study. The day was failing, the light gradually easing as the earth spun away from the sun. Blackbirds around the house were making the loud clucking sounds that signalled the approach of dusk; amid their clamour he could hear the thin, wavering line of a robin’s song. Such songs, he thought, such songs, issuing from such tiny, fragile scraps of matter.
The maids had not yet lit the lamps. He might have rung the bell and summoned them to do so, or he might have lit them himself, but for the moment he preferred to remain in the twilight. This was his favourite time of day, when the interaction between the physical and spiritual seemed strongest, when the barriers that were supposed to part the living and the dead dissolved into nothing. To say that at dusk he found himself able to conjure the spirits of the past was not entirely accurate, for often the spirits appeared unbidden in his inner vision, rising before him, beckoning, speaking.
Was he abnormal? he thought. Surely other men were like this? Yet he knew it was not so. Other men were not like him. Somehow, by temperament and training, his sensibilities had tuned themselves to a different key. At the drop of a hat he could change perspectives; could fly back to his childhood and become the boy he once was, or slip into the part of some other person, dead or alive. Equally, without difficulty, he could become a tree or a bat, or a bird. One effect of that daily relocating of the self was to loosen the ties that held him in the here and now, and set him free in a space of airy imagining.
Now, in this detached state, he indulged himself in a vision of his own funeral at Stinsford Church. It would be a winter’s afternoon not unlike this, he felt certain; a chill winter’s afternoon, a sharp breeze cutting from the north, and the light already beginning to leave the day, even though the hour was scarcely beyond two o’clock. There would be an excellent turn-out; many local people would come to bid farewell to the mason’s son who had made good. All of the metropolitan crowd would be there; the train that morning from Waterloo would have been full of men in mourning vestments. The lane running down to the church would be lined by motor-vehicles and horse-drawn cabs.
He thought it likely that as many as five hundred might attend; far too many to fit in the church’s narrow pews. He was a famous man; his death would have been reported in every newspaper, with long obituary notices and lavish tributes. Would any record the struggles of his early years? A country education had not given him the advantages that many men had enjoyed; denied the chance of university, he had had to tutor himself in Latin and Greek. Would any say how much doubt and uncertainty had dogged his footsteps, and how much determination and perseverance had been necessary to achieve what he had achieved? No, they would not say anything of the sort. How little they knew! And quite right, too: there was no need for them to know everything.
He waited by the grave; as they filed past, singly or in pairs, they averted their eyes. Among them was Gertie Bugler, beautiful as ever, a pair of long black gloves on her hands and a look of quiet intensity on her face; to his faint amusement, at the sight of her shapely calves and narrow ankles, he detected within himself a last quickening of desire. How strange! Yet there was no doubt that although corporeally he had no existence at all, some portion of his dwindling self desired her as his own, even now. More came. His brother, Henry; his sister, Kate. That saying about blood being thicker than water was a good one; during his life, he had never lost sight of the importance of family. Cockerell, of course; and who was that? Barrie! He was pleased by that; excellent that Barrie had bothered to come down, the old fox. There was Augustus John, looking his usual angry self, glaring at the universe. O, and Kipling, too, with a fat moustache, even fatter than Barrie’s.
Some of the mourners he failed to recognise. Tradesmen, perhaps; journalists; acquaintances from times gone by? Others he recognised with acute surprise. What was Tennyson, whom he had met once or twice in London, but who had died at least thirty years earlier, doing in the ranks of the living?
He did not feel the slightest inclination to accompany them into the church. One feature of his personality was that he had always found himself to be most enamoured of churches when they were empty. The presence of other human beings, the troublesome nature of the liturgy and the turgid quality of the hymns distracted from the meditative atmosphere that had always appealed to him. He had not attended a service for years.
Once the heavy door was closed – by some miracle of compression, all must have crowded in, packing the nave and the aisles – his spirit remained outside to browse the familiar yard, with its yew trees and grey stones, and its uneven, mossy turf.
No doubt, he thought, a good many of those attending the funeral, especially t
hose who had come from London, would have preferred him to be laid to earth in a more convenient plot. At one time he himself had entertained the merits of a larger church, that of St. Peter’s, in the centre of the town and a short walk from the railway station; but it was a church for townsmen, not for a man such as he. Another church, even larger – the nearest church, in yardage, to the house, and the church that Florence sometimes attended – was Fordington St. George, but it was an edifice for which he no longer felt any affection, the vicar of the past two decades having carried out a piecemeal destruction of its glories in the name of modernisation.
In truth, only Stinsford – this quaint old place, a model of country reticence on the edge of the water-meadows – was possible. This was where his forebears were buried. His grandfather, his grandmother, his uncle, his father and mother: their graves were here, and here, and there, in the yew’s shade. His first wife, Emma, lay here too, waiting for him in the pit, the stone temporarily put to one side. Dear Em: even if, in latter years, his and her relations had grown chilly, a matter that, inasmuch as he was at fault, continued to cause him regret, she had stood by him while he made his name in the world of letters. What times they had had together! Briefly, he contemplated the notion that their mortal remains would mingle in the cold Wessex loam. Would Florence, too, join them at the last? Tom with his two wives, one on each arm, travelling onward?
There was another poem here that he might have written, and without too much trouble: a last poem, ‘The Three Ghosts’. How would it begin? Each silently rising from the ground in an inchoate cloud: first he, then she, and she, drifting, shape-shifting, gradually assuming the looming likenesses of their former selves. Old thoughts, and old, much-used rhymes – how often he had pressed them into reluctant service – but it was too late now for all that. A wave of self-pity broke through him as he faced the fact that he would write no more; his hand would cease to move, his fingers stiffen; all would cease.
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