The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  I gave up gluten, too. I knew, as a New Yorker who craved sesame bagels and Hawaiian pizzas and thick crusty heroes, that it might be difficult, but I wanted to act out of solidarity with Beverly. Eating gluten-free was something I could join and support her in, as she had joined and supported me in my life with brain damage, marrying me, loving me, sharing her deeply private home world with me. Besides, as the family’s cook I knew there was a risk, if I didn’t give it up, of contaminating her food with gluten from my own.

  Her pain resolved, she got stronger, fitter. It was a joy to see her move like Beverly again. And I lost eighteen pounds and my cholesterol dropped 25 percent. How fitting that a small sacrifice done out of love—a kind of speaking my heart—should end up directly benefiting my heart. We seldom ate in restaurants anymore because there were so few we could trust to be rigorous enough about gluten. Which made travel risky, and explains why Beverly spent hour after hour studying British restaurants, inns, B&Bs, grocery stores. And why she was elated to find Tea Is for Tess.

  It was located in the historic market town of Wareham, near Poole Harbor and the coast, in the heart of what Hardy called South Wessex. When Beverly found it on the Internet, located it on Google Maps, and zoomed in for a satellite view, she called me over to her computer. The words “Enjoy our gluten-free menu” were clearly visible on a sign beside the door. The menu was even available online. We’d been looking forward to it as a great treat. Worry-free food! That’s a big deal in the life of people on restricted diets.

  In his work, Hardy had transformed Wareham into Anglebury and sent Thomasin Yeobright to Anglebury in her failed attempt to marry Damon Wildeve at the start of The Return of the Native. If Thomasin could get there easily enough by foot and wagon from her home at Blooms-End—the cottage at Higher Bockhampton—then Beverly and I in our zippy rental car could detour ten minutes out of our way to eat at Tea Is for Tess. Gluten-free and Hardy-obsessed. I don’t know how it gets much better than that.

  Distracted, pouting, Chloe brought us two new menus and removed the ones Sharon had given us. “Everything on this one’s okay,” she said. Then she stood there, waiting to take our order, drumming her pencil tip against the pad in her left hand. She seemed harried even though there was only one other occupied table. She looked around, looked up and down, anywhere but at us as she bobbed her head and moved her lips to some inner song. I thought she resembled a young Kate Winslet from the movie version of Jude the Obscure, then realized I needed to stop imagining everyone I encountered as characters in Hardy movies.

  I ordered prawn salad with the British incarnation of Thousand Island dressing, Marie Rose sauce. Though I was hungry, I needed a light entrée because what I’d been longing for, from the moment I’d seen the online menu, was the first gluten-free cream tea I’d ever had. Scones, for God’s sake. Apple Crumble and Treacle Sponge Pudding. Wanted to leave plenty of room for that. Beverly, thinking the same way, ordered a cheese and leek quiche, which was prepared with an almond flour crust.

  “Cream tea,” she said. “I’ve been dreaming about this.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the time my mother took me to the Russian Tea Room in New York?”

  “Yes, you have. Many times. But tell me again.”

  “I must have been seven or eight because we still lived in Brooklyn and took the subway. It was up on Fifty-Seventh Street and the inside was enormous. Huge chandelier, paintings everywhere, samovars on tables, people in furs, tailored suits. Snooty waiters.”

  “I bet she asked to change tables, right? Too much breeze, too much light? Show those big shots who they were dealing with.”

  “Of course. Changed tables twice. By the time we were served I was so afraid of spilling something and getting whacked that I could hardly eat, which pissed her off even more than if I’d spilled. She’d ordered some pastries with cream and confectioner’s sugar. No way to eat it without making a mess. She just sat there seething.”

  “So you were trapped. In trouble if you eat, in trouble if you don’t.”

  “Right. Plus the waiter didn’t bring the food fast enough and the busboy tried to clear the table too soon. She was exactly where she most wanted to be and responded by being more and more furious. But God, I loved that tea for some reason. I must’ve had three cups. Tea in a restaurant! I took it upon myself to compliment the waiter. When he left the table my mother grabbed my hand and squeezed. ‘Shut up, you pisher. You have nothing to say. Never did and never will.’”

  “No matter how many times I hear that story, it shocks me.”

  “I don’t think I ordered tea in a restaurant from 1955 until we got to England two weeks ago. I can’t believe how good it feels to do that.”

  “And now you’ve not only ordered tea, you’ve ordered gluten-free cream tea. In England, home of the poshest of accents. Your mother would . . . what’s that word?”

  “Plotz.”

  Sharon came back to our table. I thought—dreaded—that she was going to say the cream tea wasn’t available. But, and I can still feel how relieved it made me, she’d come back to tell Beverly it would take a few minutes for the quiche to be ready. And to talk some more about Hardy.

  “You’re into Hardy, aren’t you?” she said. “Can tell right off when real fans come in.”

  “My husband is,” Beverly said. “The plots are too grim for me.”

  Sharon accepted that with a quick dip of her head. “Particularly Tess, I’d imagine,” she said, leaning back to laugh, “and Jude, too. Grim is the right word. No wonder he stopped writing novels after that one. I mean, how much further into the dark could he go?” Then she reached over to touch my arm and said, “Here’s the question I like to ask, if you don’t mind. The answer tells me a lot about someone. What’s your favorite thing that Hardy wrote?”

  “Whoa. That’s a hard one.” I’d read The Mayor of Casterbridge at several points in my life, but it wasn’t my favorite. Too much coincidence and contrivance, and the suicidal conclusion. And Jude the Obscure, which ironically had brought me so much hope, was too hyperdark and fatalistic to be a favorite book. “I can usually respond to almost any of his stuff. But I do draw the line at The Dynasts,” I said.

  “Well, that tells me what’s your least favorite, and welcome to the club. I’ve met only a handful of people who’ve even managed to finish The Dynasts. But what about the one you love?”

  “Well, take away the heavy-handed ending and all the moralizing, I think Two on a Tower is the one that flat-out moves me the most.”

  “I see.” Sharon nodded. “So you like a real love story.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that a lot since we got to Dorset.”

  “Love stories?”

  “Hardy and love, yes.” I took a sip of water. “What he got, what he missed.”

  Sharon looked around the shop, lowering her voice. “Love wasn’t easy for him, was it? In his books or in his life.” She was silent for a moment, thinking about what she wanted to say next. “How much do you know about his life?”

  “Just what’s in the biographies, and the Life he ghostwrote. Plus the poetry and fiction, of course.”

  “Then you know about Tryphena?”

  “His Sparks cousin?”

  She waited to see if I would say anything more. The other couple in the shop got up to leave, thanking Sharon on their way out. Because of how quickly and steadily she’d been speaking, Sharon’s silence seemed ominous, like sudden cacophony on a film score.

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  “Perhaps his cousin?”

  “There are those who say she was something more.”

  “You mean his lover?”

  “That, too. But some say she was also closer than a cousin. That she was the illegitimate daughter of his mother’s illegitimate daughter, actually.”

  “So, his niece,” Beverly said. “And his lover.”

  “He probably didn’t know they were more than cousins till later,” Sharon said, “when he ga
ve her a ring and the family went mad.”

  Beverly looked at me. I knew what she was thinking: another recipient of the ring.

  “And then he broke the relationship off ?” I asked. I hadn’t remembered any of this from the biographies. Hardy’s stern mother had an illegitimate daughter? Who in turn had one of her own, who grew up to be Hardy’s lover? That came dangerously close to soap-opera territory. Or the plot of a potential Thomas Hardy novel.

  Perhaps this incestuous connection was what he’d missed—the fact that the woman he loved was so closely related. “Or did Tryphena break it off ? Or was there something like a family conclave?”

  Sharon didn’t answer. Instead, she left the table and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with our salad and quiche on a tray alongside a copy of Hardy’s Complete Poems. She served our meal, told us to enjoy it, and left the book for us to peruse. “Page 62,” she said. “Thoughts of Phena, At News of Her Death.”

  Instead of reaching for the fork, I took my pen from my pocket and stopped myself just before sticking it into the salad. As we ate, I kept rereading the poem until certain phrases began to grab hold. Hearing of Tryphena’s death, thinking about how long they’d been out of touch and how little he’d known of her life after they parted, her marriage and children, her years in Devon, Hardy called her his “lost prize” and recognized that he retained only “the phantom of the maiden of yore.” She haunted him, but only in the form of her early years, the years when they’d been close. Sure, it could mean that this phantom, this lost prize, was more to him than simply a cousin. Those are intense ways to recall her. But it didn’t prove anything, on its own.

  Sharon returned to clear away our plates and make certain we still wanted our cream teas. When we said we did, she nodded to Chloe, who went into the kitchen. “I’ll just say one more thing, since you did mention your interest in Hardy and love. There are those say he based all his great heroines on Tryphena. The whole tragic lot of them, lost to love. Never did stop writing about her in his novels.”

  She left us again, and we reached across the table to hold hands. Beverly said, “That can’t be the thing that haunts him still—being unaware they were uncle and niece—it has to be even deeper than that.”

  Chloe brought out a pot of tea and a plate of scones with jams and clotted cream. The scones looked so fluffy I had to smile. At last, someone’s figured out how to bake a gluten-free scone that rises. It was at least four inches thick.

  Beverly examined hers and said, “Oh no!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Stretch marks.” She pointed to the scone I’d picked up and torn open. “Look at it. Have you ever seen a gluten-free dough that rose like this?”

  “Maybe Sharon has a secret about that, too?” But I knew Beverly was right. And I knew her radar was infallible when it came to this stuff.

  “No way it’s gluten-free,” she said.

  We called Chloe back. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s okay to eat.”

  Beverly picked up our plates and walked past Chloe to the kitchen area. When she returned, empty-handed, she said, “Sharon almost passed out when I showed her the scones. Chloe, apparently, is having an off day. Snatched the wrong ones to serve us.”

  When Sharon brought the gluten-free scones, they were only a little less flat than matzoh. We had no doubt about them being gluten-free. She was mortified, and told us there would be no charge for the cream tea. The mistake was, she said, quoting Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things.

  As though in compensation, she stood by the table and said, “Since we were talking about Hardy’s lost love, did you know there are people who believe Tryphena bore Hardy a child?”

  We got into the car and sat there staring through the windshield at the exterior of Tea Is for Tess. Its skin was a little chapped from the wind, but otherwise the building looked solid and sound. It was real. Breeze ruffled bunting strung for the Jubilee celebration. A sturdy gray Vauxhall turned in from the street and parked by the “Enjoy our gluten-free menu” sign. The driver was neither dressed in Victorian garb nor resembled Thomas Hardy. I was feeling the need to verify such things.

  I hadn’t had the presence of mind to question Sharon about what she’d said. Just started spreading jam on my disk of fluffless scone and nodded as though it made perfect sense to me that Tryphena Sparks had given birth to Hardy’s child. Perfect sense that she was eleven years younger than her baby’s father, who was at best her cousin, at worst her uncle. Tidy Thomas Hardy with a secret life almost as messy as Lord Bryon’s.

  When we paid our bill, Sharon thanked us, told us the weather promised to be fine, and wished us well. It was almost as though she understood I’d need time to process what she’d given us.

  I put the key in the ignition, but still didn’t start the car. “Hardy and Tryphena had a child,” I said. “What’s next, we find out he had a secret twin named Tim?”

  “Is this the first you’ve heard of a child?”

  “I’m not sure. After Sharon said that, I vaguely remembered a child coming up in the biographies but being dismissed as bogus. I think there was something about a gay relationship too, with a friend who later killed himself. All unsubstantiated gossip. I guess I didn’t pay much attention to any of it, and it didn’t stick.”

  “We’ve already heard the one about Tryphena being the love child of his mother’s love child. If what Sharon said is true, we’ve got a third generation of love children.”

  “Plus all those other flirtations, like with Cassie Pole. I don’t know, it fits and it doesn’t. He comes across as this detached fuddy-duddy who spent a lot of time in his room writing. Staid, old hands-off Hardy. But then there’s all the love-related torment in his work. His totally overt furtive maneuvers. His own record of all the women across the years who obsessed him.”

  “And this family tradition of love children we keep hearing about.”

  “Which would explain that zeal for secretiveness. This is the guy who burned all his papers and self-ghostwrote a biography in which a lot of key years and key people were left out. Maybe those were the years of the child in his life. Or maybe being with his child is what he missed, for some reason. If there was a child, did it survive? Was Hardy in its life? I keep thinking about the tragic child in Jude the Obscure who kills his half siblings and then hangs himself. I need to do some serious reading when we get home.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why Hardy’s spirit might not be at rest.” Beverly leaned her head back against the seat and took a deep breath. “I’m tired. Let’s go back to the room and take a nap before we do the coast walk.”

  We drove toward the B&B in West Lulworth. The tight rural road we were on, B3070, twisted across the River Frome and West Holme Heath, and took us near an army firing range where signs warned of “Sudden Gunfire” and “Tanks Crossing.” Soon it narrowed further and entered a tight dark zigzag of overhanging trees. I slowed and kept to the center of the road, knowing Beverly was thinking the same thing I was: Remember Penzance.

  On our way from Crantock to Land’s End last week, we’d been on a road just like this when a gleaming black Land Rover suddenly filled the road ahead, coming right at us. I veered left and hadn’t been able to see a mound of dirt at the blind edge. I drove over it fast enough and the mound was substantial enough that we both thought the car was going to flip. Which was only a warm-up for the return trip through Penzance, when another burly vehicle—a van, this time—burst into another long narrow tunnel between high hedgerows. This time a hidden jutting rock jolted and slashed our front left tire. The jarring was so thorough, the sound so loud, we were sure the car’s chassis had been mangled and the wheel destroyed. Beverly screamed, then laughed with relief at finding us still alive. I pulled over and we assessed the damage. The impact had been confined to the tire and wheel. The rubber was profoundly gouged in two places, with flaps like torn skin revealing the inner tire wall, but it wasn’t
flat. Wasn’t even leaking air. Beverly nudged the flaps back into place but we knew they weren’t likely to stay.

  Before we’d arrived in England, I imagined the great challenge would be driving on the wrong side of the road with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car and the gear shift on the wrong side of the steering wheel. But that turned out to be manageable, if never quite natural. The great challenge was the absurdly narrow roads edged by concealed brick walls and sharp protruding rock, gouged with potholes, lacking lane markings, distorted by shadows out of which speeding vehicles bolted and gave no ground, festooned with roundabouts, and lined with confusing and contradictory road signs. I’d read in the Daily Mail that at one junction near Oldham, motorists are told not to turn left, not to turn right, to give way, and to keep to the 40 mph speed limit—all at the same time. It all made “Sudden Gunfire” and “Tanks Crossing” seem like benign notices. To drive British roads was to enter an arena of pandemonium where cutting-edge automobile technology met medieval road designs and neolithic human combat impulses. I needed to nap any day I did a lot of driving.

  By the time we reached the B&B, I had to gather myself before entering the property. The building was stone and built in 1871, before anyone was planning to accommodate cars. Pulling into its small parking lot required you to swing out into the oncoming lane of rushing traffic, make a sharp turn off the road, squeeze through an opening barely wide enough for a horse-drawn cabriolet, and veer up a steep slope without damaging the bottom of the car. Exiting backwards—the only way out—was even trickier. I didn’t want to think about doing that again.

  When we entered the B&B, the owners were sitting in their dining room having tea. Anthony Swain stood and waved us over. Lean and fit in his late fifties, with crisply parted gray hair and a careful balance of reserve and bonhomie, he was retired from the military and still charmed by the novelty of running a B&B. And when he needed a break, he’d told us that morning, he went to look at the sea. “Go every day,” he said. “You never lose that after so many years as a navy man.”