Free Tess by Emma Tennant

pretentious, with no grace of design or detail, and with two hideouslow-flanking turrets with pointed roofs of blue slate’, according to one observer at the time of building. And, worst of all, the stairs up to Emma’s bedroom go past the walls of Hardy’s study. In the last months of her illness, he will hear her mount those stairs – often in agony – and he won’t go even as far as the landing to offer her assistance.
    No wonder, after Emma’s death, he feels remorse!
    But at the time, nothing matters to Thomas Hardy except himself – and his new love, of course.
    For Hardy has fallen in love – with the young Florence Dugdale – she who sent him a posy of flowers in her ecstasy of admiration; she who, invited to Max Gate with Hardy’s old friend Florence Henniker, stood at the front door as she was leaving and drew the great man’s attention to the flowers in his own front garden.
    â€˜Until then the faint scent of the bordering flowers swam unheeded away’, penned Hardy lovingly.
    But in the autumn of 1888, the meeting with Florence Dugdale is seventeen years away into the future.
    And Thomas Hardy longs for love. He dreams of a young woman he sees sometimes in London, Agatha Thornycroft.
    He dreams, too, of Augusta Way, whom he sees when he visits his mother at Bockhampton.
    Most of all, he dreams of Augusta Way. And, in his dreams, he word-paints Tess.
    The old ballad begins to be sung through Hardy, in that grim house where Emma, increasingly absent-minded, makes the running of the house and the management of servants an impossible burden to them all.
    Hardy’s best companion is his dog Moss, a brindled-looking animal, half-Labrador. They walk together, in the Valley of the Little Dairies and the Valley of the Great Dairies (Blackmoor and Frome) and on Egdon Heath, where Moss starts up a hare.
    And, as the hare dances away, Hardy sees his love disappearing too: his taste for love, his ability to love, his own capability of inspiring love in others. After all, he is nearing fifty.
    Hardy stands alone with Moss, on the outcropping of green hillthat was once an Iron Age settlement and looks down at the sea and Chesil Beach.
    He bends to pick up a stone.
    With its worn, rough curvature and an indentation at the centre under two stripes and a knobbly protuberance that is like a nose under eyebrows, he could be holding an early love goddess: a Neolithic Venus: a totem for the fertility he feels draining away on all sides – from his loveless, childless marriage, from his own powers as a fertilizing male.
    Hardy looks at the stone and it seems to look back at him.
    Anonymous were the representations of the individual in antiquity. All-important was the shape below the casual dash of features, of eyes and brows and nose.
    The mouth. The vulva. So shrunk were these goddesses of copulation and procreation that the one stood for the other, and the figurine – round, squatting under its outsize baby head – was only a receptacle for a receptacle. The bearer of a hole.
    Hardy dreams of Tess’s love. He sees in his creation (for already Tess is more alive than the original, the pretty dairymaid Augusta Way – and, to this day, remains so) the mouth of his dreams. Perhaps it’s Agatha Thornycroft’s mouth, seen and conceivably tasted on those metropolitan visits so necessary to an unhappily married genius who lives in the depths of Dorset. But, unquestionably, first and foremost, it’s the mouth of Augusta Way.
    And as Hardy walks back – a long walk that will take him through Powerstock and Toller Porcorum – up onto the ridge of the hill that leads down to Beaminster via Evershot – he fills his Tess with love and hope and dreams – and as surely takes them away again, like the sea dragging and pushing on the stones.
    Hardy blows life into Tess. Of course, she’s a fictional character when all is said and done, and he has