In his judgement, what had happened had happened, and as nothing could undo that it was best left to recede into forgetfulness. Since she was surely of the same mind, they ate in silence. The broth steamed, and the silver of the spoons shone in the candlelight.
He ate slowly and carefully. Mutton broth had long been one of his favourite soups, especially at this time of year. It was a nourishing winter dish; within the thick, salty liquid were small pieces of carrot, turnip, potato, barley and other vegetables, not always easy to identify. This evening he found a chunk of what he surmised, from its texture, to be parsnip, although upon further reflection he was not entirely sure. The beauty of the concoction was that the flavours of the different elements mingled to produce a harmonious whole.
Once he had finished, he pushed his bowl aside and turned to the eggs and toast. There were three eggs on the table, each in its own china egg-cup. At eighty-four, his appetite was not what it had once been, and as a general rule he had one egg, while Florence had two.
Having buttered his toast, he decided to break the silence. ‘I told Caddy to put the hens away.’
She started. ‘O! I’d forgotten!’
‘As it was getting late.’
‘Thank you; thank you so much; I’d forgotten.’
He tapped the top of the egg and began to prise off the end.
‘They’re good hens,’ he went on. ‘They must be happy to lay in this weather. It is a credit to the way in which you look after them.’
For a moment she did not respond. Her eyes seemed fixed on her bowl of broth, which he noticed she had scarcely touched. Then she said: ‘I was thinking of getting a cockerel. They are so splendid.’
He raised his eyebrows. Cockerels crowed not only at dawn, as they were meant to. Some cockerels misjudged things, and inconveniently took to crowing in the middle of the night. Still, the field was a little way from the house, and if it was what she wanted, he was not going to object too strongly.
‘They are your hens.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Thank you. It would mean they could have chicks, which would be so nice.’
This small passage of conversation, insignificant in itself, seemed to him to mark a first step in the restoration of better relations.
He took a pinch of salt, and let it fall into the yolk. ‘How was town? You were a long time. I was beginning to worry.’
‘I ran into people.’ She added, quickly: ‘I didn’t mean to be so long; I went into the church at Fordington.’
So that was it; she had been on her knees for hours. No wonder she was exhausted. He imagined her praying in the cold church and felt sorry for her. He understood, of course, why she had been praying; she felt guilty about her earlier behaviour, and about throwing his poems in the fire. He was tempted to say that there was no need and that he forgave her, but he was wary of reopening the wound. Instead, largely to keep the conversation going, he asked her whether the restoration at Fordington – a restoration which had been in fitful progress for about twenty years – had been completed. At this she seemed flustered and said that she had not noticed.
‘I shouldn’t think it’ll ever be finished,’ he remarked. ‘That vicar … from what I hear he’s lost the support of his flock.’
‘Sometime it will be.’
‘What?’
‘Sometime they must finish it.’
‘I doubt it. The trumpets will sound, and they’ll still be fiddle-faddling around.’ He put a spoonful of hot egg in his mouth. ‘The best thing for that church would be for him to die. Wessex, behave yourself.’ The dog was gently scratching his trouser leg. ‘Stop it. Stop begging.’
‘Thomas – when I was in the town I happened to meet Mrs. Bugler’s father, Arthur Bugler, in South Street.’
He waited.
‘She has changed her mind. She has decided not to play the part up in London. She has decided, after long reflection, that it would not be right. I am sorry, Thomas.’
He put down his spoon. He stared down the length of the table, between the two candle flames. ‘Mr. Bugler told you?’
She raised her eyes to his. ‘She is writing to Harrison.’
The old man said nothing.
‘And, you know, I do believe that she has made the right decision. She is acting in a selfless way, as she should. It is the right decision. I admire her for it.’
How had this happened? How had this happened, and why? When everything had been arranged, for this to happen, and without any warning? If she had serious reservations, why had she not come to talk to him? He would have stiffened her resolve.
‘When did she decide this?’
‘I don’t know. Several days ago, I think.’
‘So she is writing to Harrison?’
‘Yes. And to you, I expect.’
There was a lengthy pause, while he pondered. ‘Did he explain why she had changed her mind?’
‘I should have thought it obvious. She has come to the conclusion that she should put her husband and baby first.’
Another lengthy pause. Was that it? Or was it that she had suddenly taken fright at the thought of London? It was a mystery; she had never given the slightest indication that she was in two minds. She had always seemed so certain of herself.
‘Her father did indicate that he thought she was right.’
‘In what way, right?’
‘I don’t know. To put her family first.’
It was not hard to find one possible cause of her volte-face. Gertie’s clodpole of a husband had made clear his opposition, and had forbidden her to go. If so, how selfish of him to stand in her way! How petty and small-minded!
‘I think it is all for the best,’ Florence said. ‘I know it is disappointing for you, but what it does mean is that Sybil Thorndike can play the part, and she will do it so well. She will be a different Tess to Gertrude, but a very good one. Everyone who saw her in “Saint Joan” said she was quite wonderful. She will bring a true professionalism to the part.’ She carried on in this flurry of enthusiasm, saying how the critics adored Sybil Thorndike, how Sybil Thorndike was a vastly experienced, accomplished actress, incomparably the best actress in England, how the theatre would be full of people wanting to see Sybil Thorndike.
Noting the unmistakeable triumph in her voice, his feelings turned to bitter resentment. She had never believed in Gertie; she had wanted Sybil Thorndike from the start. Well, it was his play, and it was not going to happen; not in his lifetime, anyway. Better that there should be no production at all than have Sybil Thorndike, a woman in her mid forties, a woman who would be incapable of managing the Wessex accent, in the role of Tess. What a grotesque mis-casting! She was the same age as Florence herself!
He let her run to a halt, waited a moment, and then said, in the most brusque tone he could muster: ‘Sybil Thorndike is too old. I am not having Sybil Thorndike playing the part. Let there be no more mention of it.’
Calmly he finished his egg, pushed back his chair, patted his mouth with the napkin, and departed the room.
That evening he was due to have a hip-bath in his bedroom, as he did every Monday evening, winter and summer alike. There was a large enamelled bath with claw feet which, several years earlier, at great expense (an expense that had appalled him), Florence had had installed in a room on the ground floor, and to which water, both hot and cold, was delivered by pipe and tap; but, perverse as it probably seemed, he preferred to do as he had always done. So, after the grandfather clock had struck nine, the two maids carried the jugs of boiling water from the kitchen up the narrow twists of the back stairs, poured their contents into the iron tub, arranged a flannel, a sponge and a cake of coal-tar soap on a side table, and hung a towel on a nearby towel rail.
Once they had gone – once the door was shut and he was alone, save for Wessex, who always seemed to enjoy watching him take a bath – he began to undress, removing his jacket, tie, waistcoat and other items of clothing.
The bath had been drawn close to the stove; even so, on a winter’s night such as this, the water tended to cool with some rapidity, and he hurried a little, fumbling the buttons of his shirt, although before committing himself wholly to the water he took care to test its temperature with a foot. When he entered the bath he sat still, allowing the heat to communicate itself to his various limbs and extremities.
Here and now, his physical decline was inescapable. Studying his legs, he was struck by how thin they were, the muscles of the calves and thighs having wasted away for lack of use. They bore fewer hairs than they had once possessed, and on the edge of the left shin there was an irregular inky stain, the memory of a moment one night when Florence was in London; answering an urgent call of nature, and confused by the darkness, he had walked into the side of the door. Bruises had once cleared up in the space of a few days, but this one showed no sign of fading, and probably would still be there when he died. With a sense of revulsion he foresaw his corpse stretched on a thin table, under a white sheet. The dead were at the mercy of the living; how many strangers would pull back the sheet to stare at his flaccid arms and skinny shanks?
He wetted the sponge and rubbed it against the cake of soap. Slowly he wiped his chest and the folds of his stomach. As the warm water lifted a musty smell off his skin, a line drifted into his mind: ‘Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.’ That was Shakespeare: the aged King Lear, responding to Gloucester’s proffered hand.
He dangled his own hand towards Wessex, who licked the skin with his rough tongue and gazed at him with blue-filmed eyes. ‘O, Wessex, Wessex,’ he said. ‘What is to be done? What will happen next? Hmm?’
He felt unaccountably tired. Or rather, not unaccountably: Florence’s tantrums always drained him of energy.
His thoughts drifted indistinctly while the water cooled further. An owl was hooting loudly in the trees, and another owl, somewhat further away, near the railway line, hooting in reply. Owls were particularly vocal on frosty winter nights, especially in the early hours and towards dawn, the intervening passage of time being presumably devoted to the pursuit of voles, mice and other delicacies necessary to the sustenance of life. Briefly he imagined the moonlit bird on the sturdy branch of one of the pines, calling and then listening to the reply that it received from its neighbour. There was a third owl in the vicinity, and possibly even a fourth, also uttering a series of short, piercing shrieks, although as the various calls conjoined and overlapped it became hard to distinguish one from the other. Since boyhood he had enjoyed the hooting of owls: that fluttering, haunting sound, that ‘wild hallooing … a jocund din …’
With an effort of will, he climbed out of the tub, dried himself by the stove, and pulled on his night-shirt. The shirt, newly laundered and ironed, smelt slightly burnt.
At which Florence entered the room, carrying his nightcap. She seemed even more nervous than usual; her eyes loaded with anxiety, her face expressive of much apprehension. It was this nervousness that, perhaps, irritated him more than any other single thing; yet his irritation was what made her nervous, as he was well aware. She is not happy, he thought to himself, she is never happy. Why are you never happy? he might have asked her. Are there no happy memories, no memories of your early life, to which you can return at moments of strain?
He put on his dressing gown, knotted the cord around his waist, and slid his feet into a pair of leather slippers. She put the glass of whisky on a side table and began to pick up the clothes that he had left scattered on the floor.
‘Leave it to the maids,’ he said.
‘They cannot do everything,’ she seemed to reply, but in a voice so quiet that he was unsure whether he had heard correctly.
He helped Wessex on to the bed, for the old dog had lost his spring and was no longer capable of climbing there himself. As he did so he found a burr lodged in the dog’s nether quarters. ‘What’s this? A burr? He needs a good brush.’
‘I brushed him this morning.’
Why did she react so? ‘My dear, you misinterpret me – I am not reproaching you.’
‘I brush him every day. Every day. I always brush him. I’ve done it for years. You know I always brush him.’
He did not know and, as so often nowadays, felt himself at a loss. ‘He’s a very lucky chap.’
‘I always brush him,’ she repeated, tightening her lips.
He examined the dog and found a second burr, this one deeply tangled. Wessex quivered his muzzle and bared his teeth as the old man pulled it out. ‘Wessex, stop that,’ he said.
Then he had the two hairy burrs in his hand.
‘Thomas, give them to me,’ she said impatiently, and with a quick movement she threw them in the unlit fireplace, an action that at once recalled the way she had thrown the poems into the fire in his study.
But then she rang for the maids. They must have been waiting nearby, for immediately they came into the room. One at either end, they carried out the tub with its swill of dirty water.
Florence sat in a chair, tucking her rug under her legs and tightening her stole around her neck. She opened ‘The Georgics’ at the point where she had left off the night before, midway in Book Two. He feared that she might be in too emotional a state to read properly, and her first words were shaky, but she steadied herself, to his relief. All was well. All was well.
He sat motionless by the stove, both hands holding his glass of whisky. ‘The Georgics’, in Dryden’s sparkling translation, was a work that he admired greatly. It was the great paean in praise of rural life, much of it being a poetical guide to practical husbandry: when to plough and sow, when to reap and thresh and winnow, when not to do these things. Prosperity, according to Virgil, depended on hard work and perpetual vigilance; a farmer needed to watch the weather, keep an eye on the moon and stars, and pay tribute to the gods. Sometimes storms would blow up, sometimes crops would fail, but such troubles were to be expected, part of nature’s cycle; next week, the sun would shine from a clear sky, next year, the harvest would be a good one. Despite the uncertainties, the earth was a good place to live.
Was it true, he wondered. Was the earth a good place to live? How simple it seemed in those innocent days, how very much harsher and more complicated Life had become. But perhaps it had not been so innocent, even then; Virgil, he reminded himself, had been writing not for farmers, but for the sophisticated men and women of imperial Rome. The poems were there to feed the dreams of the city.
After a time he ceased to listen to the meaning of the words, and instead, while taking the occasional sip of whisky, allowed the sounds to play loosely around the crevices of his mind, disturbing little stones and pebbles of memory. The metaphor interested him; the thought of memories laid down in geological strata followed; thence he found himself contemplating a vision of the bay at Ringstead with its slate-dark cliffs, and how he and Emma, one sultry day in the early part of their marriage, picked their way towards a recent landslip in the hope of finding fossils that had been freshly exposed. They passed a family of four picnickers, a husband, his wife and their two young children, and later an elderly geologist, equipped with hammer and chisel, who gave them a suspicious look, as if fearing that they, not he, might discover the best of the ammonites. There were few other people, if any, on the beach that day. When they were several minutes beyond the geologist, they halted and sat on a conveniently flat rock, side by side. The rock was hot in the sun. Gazing over a milky sea, he slid his hand up one of her legs and slowly toyed with her sex while she unbuttoned his flies and gently caressed his penis. The waves came in, broke, sent little frills of bubbling lace over the pebbles, a gull or two floated by, and their mutual pleasure grew until both were on the point of ecstasy. What a moment that had been, beyond anything he could ever have dared to put in a novel! How happy he had felt as they walked back along the sea-shore! ‘Do you think we have been very common?’ she murmured, and of course their conduct was very far from what, according to accepted standards, befitted a lad
y and gentleman. But he was the son of a country mason, she of a vicar: respectable antecedents but not enough to put either of them near the level of gentry. As he now perceived, their relish derived from the knowledge that their behaviour carried a certain danger; if they had been discovered, if the fact that they had engaged in such a coarse act had become public knowledge, the scandal would have haunted them for ever.
Looking back more than fifty years, he found himself shifting positions in his usual manner. From a close distance he watched the young couple walking over the grey pebbles, the man in a dark suit, the woman in a light dress, with a straw hat on her head, against the backdrop of the ocean. They passed the hammering geologist and sat on the flat, hot rock, facing away from him. Invisibly he approached; he stole up and hung behind them as their breathing quickened. When they strolled back barefoot, hand in hand, he had withdrawn a space. Then Time’s telescope underwent a reversal, and glancing up, they spied a mysterious, white-haired old man against the darkness of the cliff.
It was hard to be sure that he had remembered correctly. Such an outrageous incident: could he have imagined it? Without Emma, there was no one to provide confirmation.
He thought gloomily: what happened that afternoon only she and I ever knew, and she is dead and buried, and when I am gone the memory will go too. At a man’s death, all the memories of his existence on earth, all those fragments of time stored and sorted, visited and inspected, all die with him. He could tell no one, certainly not Florence.
But she had stopped reading, and was closing the book, doing so with a soft but decisive clap. He stirred in his chair. The owls had long ago ceased their colloquy.
‘Thomas,’ she said.
He was appalled. After all, he had not escaped. The peace that the poetry had given him was about to be blown away. ‘Not now,’ he said quickly.
‘I must speak.’
‘No.’ He lifted a hand. ‘Florence, I understand what must have happened. It is crystal clear. She must be expecting a child.’
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