The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  “So what is it you believe you missed, Tom?”

  Clearly, such a meeting wasn’t part of the plan. Nor was Greenwood Grange within our budget. Besides, Beverly and I were happy with our B&B near Lulworth Cove, and Hardy knew his way around that area too.

  We entered the woodland where a fingerpost pointed us toward Hardy’s cottage. The wide trail rolled through sun-flecked oak, sweet chestnut, beech, a few birch and holly, and across a warm clearing. Downed, mossy limbs and thick scrub marked the edges.

  “Hear that?” Beverly said. “That’s a song thrush. Wait, over there. Hear the woodpecker?”

  She took photos as we walked, capturing the trail’s gentle rise and fall, the feeling of apparent isolation mingled with lush hidden life. We passed a small wooden waymarker for Hardy’s beloved Rushy Pond, where he’d walked with his parents on Sunday mornings and where he came by himself to stare at images in the wind-stirred surface.

  I knew we were moving along the margins of a place to which Hardy had given vivid fictional life—majestic, bleak Egdon Heath, ancient moorland, wild and unwelcoming, thorny and somber, a near relation of night, as Hardy described it—and thought I should utter some incantation that would breach whatever dimension separated us. Reach out to him. But I realized he was, in essence, all around me. I was so conscious of his presence in this Hardy heartland that I needed to focus simply on that. I thought I could even hear the spectral sound of something swishing through the underbrush.

  Then it was easy to see him passing through these woods as a teenager, walking to visit his cousins in Puddletown, who were also his first loves. Their home, Sparks Corner, was only a couple of miles away, at the end of Puddletown Forest, a cheerful place with the river right in front. But he wasn’t sure how welcome he’d be after the Christmas Mummers’ rehearsal, when he’d tried to kiss and caress his cousin Rebecca as she sat sewing by the fire. It had been a night of music and drinking, Hardy was stirred, feeling almost bewitched. Rebecca and her younger sister Martha looked so full of life, happy. Song was everywhere. He was suddenly overwhelmed, didn’t know what to do with his fervor, and hurled himself at Rebecca. She was eleven years older, and so shocked at his sudden advances that at first she didn’t resist. So he’d instinctively pushed her back and started to climb up on the narrow seat with her before she gathered herself enough to throw him aside (another instance of being thrown aside!). His aunt Mary chased Hardy from the house and told him not to come back. He was hoping that enough time had elapsed with the passing of winter and spring. He knew he had no chance with Rebecca, of course, but by now maybe Martha would welcome his attention. He’d always thought she was beautiful, her features like the best of his mother’s but full of warmth and mirth. She was older than Hardy too, but only by six years, and seemed so affectionate toward him. Maybe he would marry her someday. Those winter and spring months had been a crazed period for Hardy, fired by unfamiliar surges of desire, particularly for girls he hardly knew. He said he fell madly in love with one in Dorchester, a total stranger who passed by on horseback and smiled at him; said he admired a pink and plump damsel in the Sunday School class he taught, lost his heart for a few days to another who’d come to Dorset from Windsor, was drawn to a fourth who won Hardy’s boyish admiration because of her beautiful bay red hair, formed an attachment to a farmer’s daughter named Louisa that went deeper. He longed to speak with her, but could only manage a murmured “Good evening” that was met with silence. Looking back in old age, Hardy wondered if his late development afforded a clue to his character and action. Maybe, I thought, that’s a clue to what Hardy feels he missed, the natural growth in which his mind and body, nature and behavior, cohered.

  The trail curled and sloped down behind Hardy’s cottage. From that perspective, the thatch roof looked tinny in the spring sunlight and the cob walls gleamed. Boughs of old beeches drooped overhead and brambles butted through a wooden fence. We saw some well-worn brick facing, a couple of small windows—one of them barred—and I was struck by the starkness. Weekly workers employed by Hardy’s father would come back there to receive wages through the window.

  A few yards farther, the trail reached a crossroads. We stopped to read the inscription on a ten-foot-high granite monument, which said it had been erected there in Hardy’s memory by a few of his American admirers in 1931.

  “Nice laurel wreaths,” Beverly said, touching the brass decoration on the stone’s rough-hewn face.

  Then we walked around the building into a profusion of plants and shrubs, the old apple trees and honeysuckle, the thick box and laurestinus bushes Hardy had written about. A wooden wheelbarrow rested just beyond the off-center front door, with a small table standing beyond that, covered in a flowery cloth and set up for tea.

  Before entering the cottage, we walked away from it, heading west along the manicured pathways to get some distance and see its face afresh. Last night, preparing for this visit, I’d read Beverly the early passage from Under the Greenwood Tree in which a group of local musicians approaches the cottage from where we now stood and sees these three dormer windows breaking up into the eaves, a chimney standing in the middle of the ridge and another at each end. Now we were back within the spell of a Hardy novel, letting ourselves dwell in its rare happy, rustic opening mood, real life and fictional life merging again.

  The cottage door opened and a man wearing a bright-red T-shirt stood filling the space. Among all the browns and greens and whites, he was the brightest thing around, the center that irresistibly drew my eye. He positioned himself on the porch just to the left of the door, directly beneath the upstairs middle window—the room where Hardy had been born—and leaned back against the wall. He was enjoying the sun, which gleamed off his bald skull. He was taking a break, doing no harm. But it distracted me to see him there, or rather to be unable not to see him there. I thought if he’d worn beige or gray I’d have felt better.

  What I couldn’t do was incorporate his presence into the vista. Something about him simply couldn’t be absorbed. As we started to approach the cottage, I noticed that the closer we got, the smaller he became. It made no sense, but I plainly saw his long head contract, his florid shirt shrink. Beverly stopped to take photos of the cottage and grounds, which gave me time to back up and determine what would happen to the man. He grew larger again. Even for me, this was weird.

  I looked up at the smoke drifting out of the chimney. A June fire was necessary to help keep the earthy walls dry, but it seemed like a Hollywood effect: warmth in the aged inglenook, smell of ash, wispy vapor heading toward the heavens. Then I looked back at the man in red and noticed his resemblance to a photograph of Thomas Hardy II, the novelist’s hardworking hard-playing father. Thomas and Tommy made cider together using apples from those trees right there, the son often lost in the father’s shadow. They walked onto the heath behind the house and took turns gazing at the landscape through a brass telescope. He was, like his son, most at home all over here, so it made sense that he’d linger too.

  From where I stood, the man’s face was now in a bit of haze, but I thought I could see the familiar puffy white beard along his jaw and the wings of hair at his hat-line. The way he looked at sixty-six, in the photo appearing in every biography of his son. That thin, wide line, like the first draft of a mouth. The strength in his body even then, and steady blue eyes that showed he was seldom surprised by anything he saw, a man who knew what he knew. This was the Thomas Hardy who was comfortable around women, who drew them to himself naturally. Who married the woman he’d gotten pregnant and brought her home to live in the cottage where his mother also lived.

  Was he here now, I wondered, to offer me welcome or discouragement? He was known as a courteous, charming man, but a grave, forbidding blankness marked this figure’s demeanor. I wasn’t going to get close enough to clarify anything, since I could only see him from afar. Which led me to realize he intended to show me something about the love his son had missed. Stand back, stand still, and watch.


  At that moment, the man’s image became brilliantly clear, its features snapping into focus. I was in the right spot to see that this was the younger Thomas Hardy after all, the writer at almost thirty, recognizably himself with the full dark beard and evasive gaze. But there was a half smile, an amusement in his expression that I don’t remember seeing in photos. The red draped over his chest was, I saw, not a shirt at all. It was a bundle, perhaps an infant wrapped in a blanket, something like a small head now visible at Hardy’s shoulder. I thought I heard the softest intimation of song.

  The thought of Hardy tenderly holding a child, perhaps a child of his own, carried a wallop of sadness. Biographers have long made the point that the failure to have children was the most tragic thing about his life. Something he always regretted. I remember reading that Hardy had a gift for connecting with other people’s children—provided they were quiet and well behaved—and loved visiting their families, affectionate, never forgetting to say goodnight. Learning that a former servant was pregnant, Hardy wrote in his notebook, “Yet never a sign of one is there for us.”

  Beverly walked up beside me and said, “I wish that bald-headed guy in the red shirt would move away. Can’t get a good shot of the front door.”

  Then we both heard the sound of a violin. It was coming from inside the cottage, a few random notes that soon coalesced into a reel.

  In her forties, early in our life together, Beverly bought a used violin, some instruction books and sheet music, took a few lessons, and began to play. Soon she was devoting a couple hours a day to it. Sound travels oddly in a round house, swirling and amplifying, seeming to come from everywhere at once, and I loved to sit downstairs in the room where I wrote, listening to her practice upstairs. She’d do her scales, work on classical passages, Chopin and Bach, on Irish folk tunes and Beatles ballads, Cole Porter, Gershwin.

  I remember her playing “Turkey in the Straw” late one day as summer light softened toward dusk. It was the peak of a three-week heat wave, the yurt sweltering because its large windows and skylight were designed to collect heat, and as usual at such times we’d stripped down as the day progressed. Soon I heard her feet begin shuffling of their own accord, keeping the beat, and I imagined the room filling with music that circled her gleaming figure before spiraling down to find and embrace me where I sat. It was purely sensual, a caress of melody, and it was also sharply sexual. I knew and loved the way her hands moved. Her body, her lips as the song progressed. Outside, as though summoned by her tune, the wind picked up, whirling around the lilies blooming in our yard, making the cherry and oak leaves sway, shadows dance. All I could see and feel seemed caught up in her playing, loosed by it, and I began to sing of sugar in the gourd and honey in the horn. I’d never been so happy since the day I was born.

  At Christmas, Beverly participated in a violin recital at a retirement home in McMinnville, a dozen miles north of us. Her group prepared to play the “Christmas Hornpipe” and “Snowflake Reel,” and I remember being mesmerized as I watched her perform, seeing her concentration as she gave herself over to the group. It was both individual—I’d seen how hard she’d worked to get this reel right and to perfect her solos—and communal, the essence of that holiday’s spirit. Just the sort of musical gathering that Hardy and his family loved to be part of. I was deeply touched by witnessing it.

  Once the music came into our life, it began to spread. Beverly soon bought a flute and taught herself to play. As she practiced its higher notes, our cats would flee through the flap door and head for the woods. We added a soprano recorder and then, since she loved Celtic music, a pennywhistle too. Since she’d had piano lessons as a child, we got an electronic piano. She’d plug in headphones so her practices would be silent, but I loved to hear the soft clacking of her keys, the clicks of the sustain pedal, her breath and occasional vocalizing of random notes. She shifted her weight and from behind I saw what seemed to be her body’s own pure harmony as she moved, a kind of lyricism of muscle and skin, soul given expression. After we left the country for the city, she taught herself the guitar—classical, then blues—and the ukulele, and I never tire of listening and watching her explore the music in herself.

  Beverly is a beautiful woman. Lean, long, with strong wide shoulders, a former swimming champion who specialized in the butterfly stroke. To see her in water is to see her fully at ease, but she has a radiant elegance of movement on land too. Blonde and fair, not given to makeup or artificiality, she never pretends to be other than she is. And she has dozens of different laughs, each bringing its own unique light to her hazel eyes. A quiet, too, which is what I saw as we entered Hardy’s cottage to the reel’s even beats.

  The space inside seemed impossibly small. Even at five foot four I felt the need to hunch my shoulders as I gazed around the ground floor. Smoke and murk from the fireplace intensified the sense of closeness, as did the looming, dark, bisecting ceiling beam. Hardy’s parents and siblings—the six of them, plus his grandmother until she died when Hardy was sixteen—lived in this little area for all those years? They had guests, cooked, dined, played music, danced, conducted business? And Hardy worked—wrote four novels—perched on the window seat in a cramped, slant-roofed room upstairs that he shared with his kid brother, Henry?

  I could easily imagine Hardy’s mother with her fiercely demanding, censorious personality, overwhelming everyone and everything in these tight quarters. That’s what my mother had done in our tiny Brooklyn apartment. She’d screamed and stomped, her voice ever present in both bedrooms and the living room and kitchen, inescapable. She saw me wherever I was, or could detect whatever I’d done from a quick scan of the evidence, appearing out of nowhere all of a sudden. Once when I was around five she caught me playing with two toys at once, a small tank and a large fort.

  “How dare you!” she shouted from the doorway of my room. “I’ve told you to put away one toy before you take out another.”

  “But they go together.”

  “Don’t you backtalk me.” She marched over, picked up the two toys, and threw them in my red wooden toy chest. Then she grabbed me and threw me in there too. “In you go.” She slammed the lid and sat on it.

  I lay on my side in the darkness, sharp edges from the toys digging into my hip and ribs, and knew exactly what I had to do: keep silent, don’t cry, breathe small, wait.

  “What happened?” At first I didn’t know who’d spoken. I wanted to say “Ssshhhhhh,” so my mother wouldn’t get angrier and keep me in there longer. My heartbeat was so accelerated I could barely catch my breath. I was sweating, my skin prickly. But then Beverly touched me and I was back beside her.

  “Cramped space,” I whispered, panting, and she knew what I meant. “I’m okay.” For a moment there, it was like I’d been trapped in some kind of neural storm, a waking night terror.

  Beverly and I stood just inside the front door of Hardy’s cottage, looking into the living room where a young woman sat in an armless bentwood chair. With Beverly’s hand in mine, I could feel myself relax into the present moment. Paperback editions of Hardy’s novels were stacked on the lace-covered table beside her. She had a bonnet on her short dark hair, and topaz stones studded her earlobes. Over jeans and polo she wore an old-fashioned white smock. Her eyes behind granny glasses roamed the room as she fiddled, seeing but not seeing. Beverly and I remained still while the reel spun out.

  After a brief silence in which I couldn’t decide whether it would be proper to applaud, Beverly said, “That was lovely. It was ‘The Fairy Dance,’ wasn’t it?”

  The young woman smiled and nodded. “Thank you. Welcome to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to say next. Are you real? I was glad Beverly had seen and heard her.

  What I managed to utter was “Do you, I mean who, but, well.”

  “I work for the National Trust, and I actually live here about half the year.” She placed the violin on the table beside Hardy’s novels, and stood.
“My name’s Katie.” We shook hands. “Do you have any questions or would you just like to walk around by yourselves?”

  Have you seen him lately? Because I happen to know he’s out and about.

  “You said you live here?” I asked.

  “I do. I like it. They need somebody to take care of the buildings and property. And greet visitors, of course.” Katie took a step toward the fireplace and spread her arms, pointing to both the front and back walls. She was shifting into a prepared speech, but it sounded urgent too. “Very little has altered since Hardy’s time. We say the cottage is alive and after being here awhile you can see it really is. I mean, it’s made out of local mud and chalk and sand and straw and even tree branches, it breathes and weeps, and the walls just turn to goo if you don’t heat them up every day.”

  I think it was the word alive that caught me. I glanced at Beverly and found her already looking at me. Katie was still pointing at the walls but was looking down at the stone floors.

  “Are you from the area?” I asked her, “or was there some other reason you wanted to be here instead of a different National Trust property?”

  “Both.” She smiled. “I was born and raised in London but my family’s from Dorset. Mostly Dorchester and Chettle, but through the whole Frome valley too.” She paused, reached out to adjust the position of the violin. I found myself thinking, Go on, please go on. But I knew I had to wait in silence as she decided whether to say more. Eyes still on the violin, she said, “My full name is Katie Pole Crosbie.”