Tess (28 page)

An old story, and I slept through it, for my role was that of
accomplice to the balladeer, monkey to the organ-grinder, provider of fresh prey for the wolf. My part was written for me long ago and I sleep through the consequences. I abrogate responsibility. It's not my fault, really. Tess was the pretty one. Poor little Mary, whose father is her grandfather, will have to go the same way as her mother and all the Tesses before her. Not my fault.

But by the time I get there, of course, it's too late. Mary is just another bewildered, crying little girl who has lost her auntie by the edge of the sea. I scold her as I pull her behind me – ‘Don't go off without telling me where you're going, do you hear me? – Do it again and I'll smack you, do you hear?' And all the while I know I let this happen, I'm one of the legion of women who can't stop it, connive at it by failing to stand up against the tyranny of the lover-father in our destroyed world.

You may say, what about my mother? The strong witch-mother who gouges the staring eyes from the fish at West Bay?

– But what about Tess? Ella asks. She stares up at me, pale and anxious, as the knocking comes louder at the door.

And I try to explain. I say: You see, Tess had really only just discovered, in that summer of 1969, that her father was abusing
little Mary – his daughter and granddaughter, just as he had her, all those hard, suffering years. (Tess was in love with Gabriel Bell, remember, and she didn't look too hard at first. The child was in the care of her mother – what's wrong with that? It's very usual, isn't it, for an artist, as Tess undoubtedly was, to get some childcare help from her mother? Ah yes, but the most ordinary families have secrets such as ours: perhaps we're beginning to know that now.)

Tess had only a few days before, in that crazy summer of the moaning guitar and Vietnam atrocities on TV played out while she tried to staunch her aching loss of Gabriel, the New Jesus who was going to save her life and take her away from the injustices of the past – Tess had found out the truth. Her father – mine and the poor baby's too – had lures to tempt the child to the hut where he lived so alone and still by the edge of the water.

Like one of the fairy tales little Mary had read to her by our mother Mary Hewitt in the Mill, before she was taken up to sleep in the room with a round eye that looks out on the sea (the story was
Hansel and Gretel
, very probably), little Mary had only to follow the trail of sweet promises through the tropical gardens – which is a stone's throw from the Mill, here. She's a bright girl, can walk fast–

Tess discovered the lures – it can only have been a few days before.

I heard her shriek at our mother Mary, in the kitchen of the Mill.

– Did you know? Answer me, damn you! Did you know?

And Mary couldn't answer, of course. Because by then she was trapped in the old story, you see, and she no longer knew what she knew and what she didn't know. (And old Mrs Moores said she wouldn't be surprised if poor Mrs Hewitt didn't go back in that place outside Bridport again.)

Tess. A long line of the incarnations of Tess. I saw it in her face the night the little bed in the attic room was found to be empty –

I saw it in the white face Tess showed me at the door of my bedroom –

I heard it in the terrible slamming of the door as first Tess and then my mother, holding the knife she used to gouge out the eyes of the dead fish at West Bay …

And I saw it in the terrified face of little Mary – after her mother and grandmother had found her hiding, whimpering in the sea-grass by the side of John Hewitt's hut and brought her safely home –

Ella comes up to me at this point and leads me over to the window. The cars with their official stripes sit like a row of badgers in the narrow lane. The door of the first one opens and a tall, distinguished-looking man gets out.

Two minutes more to tell you, Ella, and Baby Tess.

I have to picture this. I wasn't there and I didn't see the killing at the end.

I have to imagine the man coming up the shingle – but then, our father John Hewitt would often walk late at night, searching for a missing member of his herd, calling a sick swan that had gone astray with a low, clucking call.

I can see the women as they came down from the ridge, two maenads, the knife held between them, two huge sea-women racing to avenge the crime. The crime of domination.

The crime of father-fuckers. I can see them, hair swirling behind them, a part of the long black tresses of the fog –

My mother and my sister Tess killed our father that night. And I came, as always, too late on the scene.

And the boat? Why, my mother saw that boat as an act of Providence, or whatever comes to witches when they're in need.

Our mother took our father's dead body all the way up the coast from Abbotsbury here, at dead of night, in the boat. She dragged him to the shallow pit at the back of West Bay, over pea-gravel the contractors started shifting last week, for the smart new bungalows.

My mother buried my father just behind the stretch of beach where she had worked as a fishwife – and had come to be a witch. She knew the tides came into that pit only once in a blue moon – and who would suspect her or her daughter Tess, then?

It's the time of the blue moon now, though, for the combination of the freak tides and the building men have brought him bobbing to the surface again. That's why, my poor little Ella, they will come in and take me away from this place.

Our father has been raised from the dead.

– And Tess? Ella asks, very grave now, as if she can see the pattern unfold before her.

Open the door, Ella. Let the gentlemen in.

Time now to get our things together and leave the Mill. The rich film folk are due for their late summer break. They'll find the swallows gone as well as the swans but there's still some warmth in the sun and it's a magnificent view you get, sitting under the fig tree on the terrace.

I tell Ella and Baby Tess that, of course, the new tenants will be all agog over the discovery of a body higher up the coast behind West Bay. They'll look at me strangely, they'll go in the little shop in Abbotsbury to try to work out who killed the poor man, half a lifetime ago.

It's quite simple really, Mrs Hands who runs the shop now will tell them.

– Two sisters lived at the Mill, see. Tess and Lizzie – they called her Liza-Lu. John and Mary Hewitt, that was the name of their mum and dad, warn't it? An' they split up – she went to work at Dowle's Fishery down on the beach at West Bay and he …

– He used to hang out in that damp little hut at the swannery, comes a voice from the back of the shop, Jimmy Hands. Then he went off to live with his sister in Canada, so Mrs Hewitt said.

– Poor man. A resident of Nasebury – Ella's mum, but the film folk wouldn't know that – shuffles forward to pay for her bread and two tins of sardines. To think of him under the stones all those years …

No one notices there's a small smile on Ella's mum's face. After all, who looks at the woman who sells postcards and brochures in the kiosk?

– The elder sister, Mrs Hands is saying, Tess she was, got in the family way with a bad sort from the Beaminster garages … what
was his name? I can't remember – yes, Alec, it was – but what I do know is, he came and took the child away to America. In the Big Fog of 1969.

The film people stand shaking their heads in the little store that sells stamps as well as tins and lettuces, so there's always a queue of old ladies, same bobble-hats and coats winter and summer, at the window with the grille.

– Who was the man who was killed, then?

Mrs Hands is losing patience. She takes a pension book, riffles the pages, affixes her stamp.

– John Hewitt. They said it was funny at the time – that he disappeared just like that – but he was an odd sort, no doubt about it. His daughter Tess was ever so cut up about it. Went into that place the other side of Bridport for quite a while …

– And the younger sister, Liza-Lu, she went off to live with that pop singer – what's he called? Mr Hands puts in. He knows he can get good custom from these folk if he feeds them titbits.

– Adam Faith?

– No … Gabriel Bell, that's it. Seems he'd been the lover of Tess – but when he came back she didn't want anything more to do with him. So he settled down here with Liza-Lu … Didn't last long, anyway. He died a few years later.

– Died? Goodness! The eyes of the new arrivals widen in pleasurable anticipation again.

– Drugs overdose, Mrs Hands says, making a tart face as she weighs potatoes and cauliflower on the scales. But we always thought Mary Hewitt had something to do with it. There was something witchy about Mary Hewitt.

– And the baby – little Mary?

– Grew up in America with her dad …

Ella turns and gazes upwards, to the room with the round window that looks out to the sea. And Baby Tess's eyes follow her …

The waiting men move forward at the sound of a light step coming down.

Tess stands for a moment on the topmost stair of the Mill. Her hair is a cloud of grey but her beauty is untouched.

She comes into the long room and takes the child in her arms, and she smiles at me.

Emma Tennant was born in London and educated at St Paul's Girls' School. She spent the World War II years and her childhood summers at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her family also owned estates in Trinidad.

Tennant grew up in the modish London of the 1950s and 1960s. She worked as a travel writer for
Queen
magazine and an editor for
Vogue
, publishing her first novel,
The Colour of Rain
, under a pseudonym when she was twenty-six. Between 1975 and 1979, she edited a literary magazine,
Bananas
, which helped launch the careers of several young novelists.

A large number of books by Tennant have followed: thrillers, children's books, fantasies, and several revisionist takes on classic novels, including a sequel to
Pride
and
Prejudice
called Pemberley. In later years, she began to write about her own life in such books as
Burnt Diaries
(1999), which details her affair with Ted Hughes.

Tennant has been married four times, including to the journalist and author Christopher Booker and the political writer Alexander Cockburn. She has two daughters and a son, author Matthew Yorke. In April 2008, she married her partner of 33 years, Tim Owens.

Discover books by Emma Tennant published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/EmmaTennant

Confessions of a Sugar Mummy

Emma in Love

Elinor and Marianne

Heathcliff's Tale

Hotel de Dream

Pemberley

Tess

The Autobiography of the Queen

The Colour of Rain

The Crack

Wild Nights

For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain
references to missing images.

This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

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