Tess (18 page)

No wonder Hardy, at the performance of
The Woodlanders
in 1913, just a few months after Emma's death and a few months in advance of his wedding in February 1914 to Florence Dugdale, leans forward in a state of high excitement. The young actress Gertrude Bugler, he has just ascertained, is none other than the daughter of his Tess! After the performance he asks for her to be brought to him. A ‘fatherly' man, as seventeen-year-old Gertrude remembers him. He smiles down at her. Seven years will pass before his incarnation is ready for him.

Florence will become the nervous, ignored, ‘hysterical' wife.
Indeed, she confides, the very month she moves into Max Gate, in a letter to a friend, that on the day of Emma's death she passed from ‘youth to dreary middle age'.

Florence has become the incarnation of the wife. And no sooner was his first wife dead than she became Hardy's early love again: he wrote six or seven of his most moving and lyrical poems in remembrance of her, in November and December 1912, with Florence newly installed.

For Florence, worse was to come.

Autumn 1916. Thomas Hardy and Florence have been married two years. On 3rd October comes the publication of
Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy
, a volume designed to make his verse more readily accessible to a wider public. Some poems were excluded – when Hardy's friend Cockerell complained to Florence that it was a pity ‘A Trampwoman's Tragedy' had been omitted (along with a few others considered a possible source of offence), Florence replied that her husband had wanted to make the volume one which could be given ‘to a schoolgirl, or the most particular person'.

Of course, there is one particular person – a person with the youthful looks and demure demeanour of a schoolgirl, a dark-eyed beauty who has recently come to the attention of the seventy-six-year-old poet and who has received his most ardent attentions too. From early spring Hardy has been putting together – revising and expanding – a series of
Wessex Scenes
from
The Dynasts
, and these were performed by the Dorchester amateurs in Weymouth in June. Everyone remarks that a man of his age should be willing and able to devote so much energy to a project. Where can it come from, this creative fervour which leads an old man to rewrite, to attend rehearsals, even to write in new scenes? Can it be the young actress, Gertrude Bugler, for whom he writes in ‘a little romance thread', involving a young waiting-woman and her soldier husband – the young actress who made such a striking Marty South a few years back?

If it is, Florence is already keen to extinguish the flame. What
started as a source of ‘pleasurable excitement', she confides to her friend Rebekah Owen in a letter, has become in the end a source of constant worry. ‘He is too old for the worry and the responsibility – for of course if it is a failure it will reflect on him. It
has
worried him so.'

Poor Florence. She has seen the ‘worry', the sleeplessness of a man obsessed by the incarnation of his own creation. The ‘romance thread' lies between the recently wed couple, as they lie in the gloomy marital bedchamber at Max Gate – Florence in knots of despair that will lead to a major illness and then a lifelong fear of its recurrence – and Hardy in a soft spider's web of desire. For the moment, as he worships his new love, he is an innocent fly, caught in the toils of the lovely Gertrude. (But one day they'll wake up together, Hardy and Florence, and in the name of married middle-class respectability break the thread, between them destroy the young actress's prospects.)

Not yet, though. Gertrude must play Tess. The story must, literally, be acted out.

In 1921 Gertrude Bugler marries her cousin, a farmer also by the name of Bugler. They go to live in Beaminster – in the house that stands on its own by the side of the graveyard to the south of the church – one of the most beautiful churches in Dorset, remember – with its fine tower (but the font has been thrown out: it will be found in a stonemason's barn too late for the christening of Gertrude's first child). She has gone far from Max Gate – but not far enough for Florence, as we shall see. (Poor Florence. She has had the very thing all wives with roving-eyed, double-hearted husbands dread: the presence of Gertrude in her house, right at her hearth.) For surely Gertrude is the perfect choice to play Eustacia Vye in the dramatization of
The Return of the Native
, given by the Christmas mummers in the festive season (by now it's 1920).

Dark Gertrude plays Eustacia – a Corfiote, a Greek beauty in the imagination of Thomas Hardy. Her tragedy is played out right there, under the eyes of Florence, as Hardy, eighty years old by now, becomes once again animated. Doesn't he say to the lovely young actress, as the applause still sounds out and he leads her aside, away from Florence's anxious gaze, to the little parlour –
doesn't he ask her then and there if she will consider playing Tess one day?

Of course, Gertrude is so pleased … but what does Florence say when she catches up with her in the porch as the mummers, fortified by mulled ale, depart?

‘A beautiful creature, only twenty-four,' Florence writes in the last drear days of December to her friend Louisa Yearsley, ‘and really nice and refined.' But there's a puzzle somewhere here, she continues: ‘she tells everyone she is taking my advice
not
to go on the stage and I am puzzled as to
when
I did give that advice.' Florence concludes that the advice must have been Hardy's and jokes about Hardy's partiality for Miss Bugler, whom she herself greatly likes.

Florence goes out onto the porch at Max Gate. It is dark and a thin fall of snow hisses under her feet as she taps Gertrude's arm and draws her aside. An interruption: the terrier Wessex, feared – and loathed – by the literary world, for its unpardonably uncivilized behaviour, rushes out into the snow and rolls at the feet of the mummers. The young actors laugh – one falls on the ground, ambushed by a snowy Wessex, whose white, wiry coat is now horribly wet and cold – and, taking advantage of the commotion, speaking close into the young actress's ear: ‘If you take my advice you won't go on the stage, Miss Bugler,' Florence Hardy says to Gertrude.

But by April of the next year, when Hardy's love is pushing up anew with the sparse scatter of purple and yellow crocuses at Max Gate, Gertrude Bugler has added Bathsheba to her repertoire of Hardyan heroines. In June, the Hardy Players perform the Bathsheba episodes again in the castle ruins at Sturminster Newton. Hardy and Florence are present.

Florence has a depressing day. Sturminster Newton is the scene of Thomas Hardy's old home, with his first wife Emma. And after the performance, Hardy insists that the cast come to tea at Riverside Villa, where he had lived with the now-idolized Emma fifty years earlier.

Hardy invites Gertrude to stay the night.

What can Florence do? Her mouth sets in a gather of fine lines
that jump and dart in the nervous movements that are precursors of her speech. She sets out hand towels – Irish linen, pale blue – for the so-much-unwanted guest.

Hardy asks Gertrude to sleep in the room in which he had written
The Return of the Native
. Surprised, flattered, she agrees.

That night, Hardy lies sleepless by the side of Florence (equally sleepless but having to pretend: only the nervous tic that has now swept to her eyelids, causing a continuous fluttering, giving away the fact that she is not enjoying a good night's rest at Riverside Villa).

Hardy has everything, or almost everything, a famous poet of eighty could possibly want. The incarnation of his greatest creation, who has now played Marty, Eustacia and Bathsheba, all the dark heroines of his dreams, lies next door in the room where he invented the tempestuous Eustacia.

All he needs now is for Gertrude to take on the mantle of Tess (beside whom all his other heroines, even Eustacia, pale). Tess, the murderess, the ‘Pure Woman, Faithfully Presented'.

And maybe there's something else the childless Hardy wants – and gets. There are, as the novelist in him is so well aware, two ways of looking at it.

It's September and Hardy can feel the usual mixture of death-love (anniversaries will be coming up soon: Emma's birthday and then the day of her death, just three days away from each other in November: how Florence hates having to accompany her husband to the grave, to lay flowers on the body of the woman she taught to die) and of renewal too, for new loves for Hardy bloom on the graves of old ones, as we have seen, and he has ambitious new plans for Gertrude Bugler.

September, and Hardy walks in the mild air with Wessex, the white wire-haired terrier who so terrorizes his literary friends (even going so far as to walk along the trestle table at mealtimes and snatch food as it goes onto the fork); and as man and dog go, they pause on the crest of the hill and look down at the world Hardy has made his own. Wessex! The whole landscape has been re-formed by the imagination of this great man; boundaries have been redrawn and names of towns altered; there are pilgrims already to the famous sites, such as Wool Manor where Tess would have spent her wedding night if she had not confessed to Angel, or the cottage at Higher Bockhampton, where the poet suffered his humble childhood. Hardy's dog is named after the fictional landscape which has seemed to become more ‘real' than the portion of Dorset, Wiltshire and Berkshire these straggling counties had been known as before – and it's Hardy's dog Wessex who pricks up his ears suddenly and stands unusually silent in the very still air.

Of course, what Wessex has heard is a hare getting up in a wheatfield below, or a rustle of wood pigeons in the coppice at the edge of the field. But Hardy knows why he and Wessex have taken this walk today – the walk that leads him to the high spot where he can look out across the pale, mottled green and yellow hills to Stinsford, Bockhampton and Kingston Maurward. Wessex barks and Hardy tells him, with unaccustomed gruffness, to shut up.

The sweet sound of bells that floats up from Stinsford church marks the wedding of Gertrude Bugler to her cousin.

Hardy stands and listens. He writes in his mind the description of the little confectioner's shop in South Street, Dorchester, and the family and friends … the strong, rich smell of chocolate and marzipan as Gertrude's father stocks the shop, hands over the glass cases with their laden trays of bonbons and ledges of softly puffed profiteroles, to the assistant who will serve while Mr Bugler and his anxious wife are at the church.

The mother of the bride, Augusta Way. Hardy flinches in his mind's eye from the thought of his first Tess grown stout and flushed.

He thinks instead of the bride. How lovely Gertrude must appear today. He sees her as a white sugared almond, from one of the tulle-covered baskets Mr Bugler prepares, complete with miniature
stork, for Dorchester christenings. Hardy dreams of biting into her pale, icing-sugar-white skin; of finding the luscious glacé cherry mouth that will be his final reward for all the care and trouble he has taken with the young actress.

After all, why should a woman give up her career for marriage and motherhood?

Hardy wanders down the hill. (He was invited to the wedding but he thought it better not to attend: Florence has been getting even more jumpy lately and Hardy wants to preserve Gertrude, like the fruit so sticky and covered with a fine glaze that old Mr Bugler sells at Christmas to the good people of the town Hardy has made world-famous as ‘Casterbridge'.)

Gertrude's name will still be Bugler. To Hardy, she remains the untouched virgin waiting for the ultimate role.

Florence, who confides to her friends on violet-tinged writing paper that everything about her life is driving her mad these days, she feels wound up like a spring, and the housekeeping is enough to make her feel she is ‘in an asylum' – is delighted to hear the sound of bells float up in the still air. That little minx Gertrude Bugler married off at last! Good riddance to her!

But Gertrude and her hearty new husband – who will farm land in the Marshwood Vale, who will bring memories of my mother's childhood back to me when I tell you, Baby Tess, of those high-hedged lanes and rich meadows filled with waving wheat and corn – just don't move far enough away for Florence's liking.

They moved to the cottage there, on that September day in 1921 (no time for a honeymoon, there's the harvest to get in), and in that cottage by the side of the graveyard of St Mary's, Beaminster, Gertrude lived until her death in August 1992.

Hardy aches for the beautiful young actress. He gives her a few months to become accustomed to her married state. Then one day – a casual visit, Wessex will come too – Hardy calls on Gertrude and she asks him in.

It's the month of February. The landscape is dead. The first primrose shows its head on the lane from Netherbury, above Beaminster, to Waytown. A hint of wild garlic is in the air. No one in the little main square of Beaminster recognizes Thomas Hardy;
though a labourer coming red-faced from the Greyhound Inn could swear he saw the man once before, snooping about and eavesdropping at the Quiet Woman pub on the stretch of lonely road between Beaminster and Yeovil (a backward sort of a place, good for gathering rough regional accents and worldly-wise old Dorset sayings, for the great man to put in his books. For Hardy has come a long way from his humble origins: he lives in a grand new house he now pretends is his due, because of his ancestry: Admiral Nelson's Hardy was his forebear, so everyone's been told lately).

Hardy goes unseen to the gates of St Mary's Church, and beyond, to the short, steep road leading up to the Bugler cottage.

Wessex's tail wags furiously – he knows when his master is excited and reflects it in the crudest possible way.

The door opens. Gertrude, the dark-eyed heroine of Hardy's dreams, comes out and stands under the low porch.