Winter

‘Then,’ said she, ‘you are no longer the man I married.’

On this melodramatic note she had left him, stalking across the lawn to the house; and when, that night, he betook himself to bed, he found that she had moved to a room in the attic. Well, he thought, if he was not the man she had wed, neither was she the woman he had met at the altar. ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure’ – that old saying was as true nowadays as it had ever been – and it struck him, not for the first time, but more forcibly than it had ever done hitherto, that the vows of lifelong love made by each party in the solemn rite of matrimony ran contrary to nature, forcing husbands and wives to endure each other’s company when the fire that had brought them together was naught but ashes.

He slept badly. Waking before dawn and in need of a space of further reflection, he decided on a walk. He took a familiar path, one that crossed the low-lying meadows by the river and that, if followed long enough, led to the little church at Stinsford.

It was one of those lovely dawns often encountered in the Wessex countryside in early summer. The sky was a clear grey-blue, the air deliciously clean, and the birds were singing loudly. A still mist had risen from the damp earth and spread itself like a white lake over the meadows, and as he descended from the higher ground into this thin, gaseous stratum he found his feet, legs and waist swallowed up, while his chest and head remained clear. The pollarded crowns of the willows on the river-bank floated on a bed of nothingness, the rising sun shone brightly on the dancing particles, and the cables of a thousand spider webs swayed and shimmered. How, he asked himself, can I possibly leave this Eden for London?

The path took him close to the buildings of a farm, and he heard light female voices penetrating the vapour. Presently the luminous shapes of the dairymaids, five in number, each one carrying a stool and a bucket, came into view as they made their way from the barton towards the river. To his gaze, they seemed to him as much spiritual as physical beings; humble country lasses, but also angels, he thought to himself. Among them was one whose beauty stood out from the rest, and who fastened on his mind with the power of a dream: a girl with long dark hair and pale features. She and the rest passed down the slope without even a glance in his direction, entirely taken up with their own chatter.

Not being in a hurry, he followed them as they receded into the lake of mist. At first he was frustrated to find that the girl who had so engaged his interest seemed to have vanished. Then she reappeared, only to duck behind the body of one of the cows. He waited, hoping that the uneven textures of the mist might thin enough to afford him a further view of the maiden, and was presently rewarded by another vision of her face, revealing a full mouth, dark eyebrows and large eyes.

She was a type of womankind to whom he was particularly susceptible. When, in thought, he used to picture his ideal woman, the face that he conjured was very like that of this innocent young Madonna of the meadows. How is this possible? he thought. Why has it taken until now for me to find her? What shall I do?

She and the other maids were now settling to their work, each one setting up her stool, and with the commencement of the milking a quietness settled on the scene. He imagined as much as saw the bevy of girls with their cheeks pressed against the smooth bellies of the cows, and seemed to hear the purring sounds of the streams of milk as they struck the sides of the pails.

A conversation between the maids began. Although he could discern neither the exact words, nor even the general sense, he was occasionally able to make out what, from its tone, he took to be a remark addressed to one of the cows. He then became aware, from the looks sent in his direction, that some of the girls had noticed him. Now, had he been younger, he could and would have walked up to them, engaged them in conversation, amused them with some light remark, impressed them – or, rather, impressed her, the maiden of his dreams. But he was middle-aged and balding, and more significantly – for the aforementioned particulars might not have been an insuperable obstacle – he was married. Well, there it was. Destiny had failed him by thirty years.

He left, walking on briskly, but the seed of the vision had germinated. Later that day he had to catch a train for London. He chose a window seat, and as the train left the town he was afforded a distant view of the meadows. The dawn was long past, the mist had evaporated, the milkmaids were gone, she was gone. Unheeding, the train bore him eastwards and finally deposited him in the dirt and noise of the great metropolis. He stayed the night in a small and unremarkable hotel; the next morning, as he walked down the great thoroughfare of Kingsway, crowded with pedestrians on their way to their places of toil, his mind was far away. He seemed to see what he had not actually seen: the girl with her cheek turned against the dappled flank of the cow, her hands kneading the teats and the milk squirting into the pail in alternate streams. A heron rose from the mist, its wings creaking faintly, a scatter of silver droplets falling from its stiff legs. He was so blind to his surroundings that he stepped into the traffic, and narrowly avoided being run down by a cab.

Back home, he made careful, roundabout inquiries of the farm manager, and discovered that her name was Augusta. She was the daughter of Jack Way, who ran the dairy. He knew Mr. Way, of course: a big, busy man whose loud voice often rang out as he bawled at the cows. He had seen Mr. Way wielding a heavy stick, clouting the rumps of cattle that lingered too long.

He made no attempt to contact her, having no possible pretext; besides, he knew himself too well not to fear that, were they to meet, he might be disappointed by what he found. It was better for Augusta to remain as he had seen her that dawn in the mist, a quintessence of unattainable, unapproachable beauty, never to be forgotten. It was she, he now thought, she and no one else, for whom he had been searching for so long; she who would become the model for Tess. The vision of his heroine grew out of the vision of the milkmaid.

A further thirty years had elapsed, and the beauty of the maiden to whom he would never speak had continued to haunt him. In those years – years that included the death of Emma – time had creased and leathered his skin, but she and the scene that she had inhabited so briefly remained unchanged. He associated her with all that pertained to the freshness and serenity of those early mornings in the water meadows: the profusion of pale pink flowers, the clumps of bright yellow kingcups, the dew-soaked grass. Details accrued, without his willing: the occasional squawk from some disgruntled coot on the nearby river, the distant call of a cuckoo.

In old age, naturally, these visions became rather less frequent than they had been hitherto. Then, some years ago, he had attended a rehearsal of one of his plays in the town, and she had appeared once more. He recognised her immediately. ‘Who is she?’ he had asked Harry Tilley, who was directing the play, and Tilley told him that she was Gertrude Bugler, daughter of Arthur and Augusta Bugler, who ran the Central Hotel in South Street. His heart had turned over. His mind was so confused he hardly knew what else Tilley had said, although he seemed to remember one remark: ‘It’ll be a lucky man who ends up putting a ring on her finger.’ He watched her in rehearsal after rehearsal. He scarcely noticed the other actors and actresses, and when he talked to her, her attentive eyes left him half dumb. He found her sympathetic, interesting, eager – everything a young woman should be.

He had never bothered to unfold this history to Florence, when there had been no reason for so doing. A suitable moment had never presented itself, and besides, experience had taught him that in general it was best not to talk to her about private matters, especially those which lay deep in the past; she was easily upset, and inclined to misinterpret things.

Three evenings after Gertie’s visit, he was in his bedroom on the first floor of the house. Wearing night-shirt, dressing gown and slippers, and holding a glass of whisky, he was seated on a wooden chair. He had a small woollen blanket over his legs. Two oil lamps were lit, one stationed by the bed and the other on a side table, and in the pool of light cast by the latter, Florence, seated in another chair, was reading aloud. She too was in her night-clothes, and in addition to a blanket over her legs she had the fox stole wrapped round her neck. Wessex, deep in sleep, one of his sandy-brown ears flopped over an eye, lay on the floor between them.

Ever since the start of their marriage she had read to him at night, usually for about an hour, occasionally for longer. It was part of the routine of their existence together, and an agreeable way of bringing the day to a natural close. Sometimes she read a novel, sometimes from a volume of poetry, so long as it was not too modern. The book that she was presently reading was one of the novels of Jane Austen, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, and for once it was her choice, not his. The old man was enjoying it a great deal. When he had read it last, a very long time ago, he had found Miss Austen a little narrow and strait-laced, but now she seemed to him an adroit observer of the human scene, and he was particularly amused to discern in himself a certain resemblance to the character of Mr. Bennet, the distant and reserved father of Jane and Elizabeth. In a pause between chapters, he said as much: ‘Do you not think I resemble Mr. Bennet, to a degree?’

Florence saw the likeness instantly. ‘Yes – you do, a little. Quite a lot, in fact.’

He nodded, pleased.

‘I very much hope I do not resemble Mrs. Bennet,’ she responded.

‘Not in the least.’

‘She is such an empty-brained chatterbox.’

‘You are not in the least like Mrs. Bennet.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘What a relief! Shall I go on?’

‘If you like.’

Moments such as this, the old man thought, were part of the success of his life with Florence. She was a good reader, sympathetic to the cadences of the prose, with a gentle, soothing voice. When she had been up in London for her operation, when he had been alone, he had tried reading to himself, both silently and out loud, but it had not worked. Late in the day his eyesight was not good enough to follow the print easily, and in any case it was not the same; just as tickling oneself fails to amuse the tickler, so reading to himself seemed a less than satisfactory affair.

He reached out for the glass of whisky, an inch of which he always drank at night and which helped him sleep. Florence never seemed to sleep that well, although he suspected that she slept better than she claimed. He watched her as she bent over the book. Her hair lacked lustre, her complexion was dull, and she had bags under her eyes. This neuritis – and then the lump in her neck! Despite the operation, she seemed as frightened as ever. Why else did she keep it perpetually wrapped up?

The doctors, he was sure, had not helped. The old man had a natural distrust of doctors that probably went back to the days of his youth, when the English countryside was home to travelling quacks who sold medicines that upon chemical examination were found to consist of no more than flour and water. Although those disreputable pedlars no longer existed, it remained the case that doctors made their livelihoods out of the illnesses of their patients, and a cynic might have suggested that it was in the interests of doctors that their patients should remain unwell as long as possible. The old man sometimes felt that there was more than a little truth in the notion. Florence seemed to derive such pleasure from her visits to her London doctors.

It was inevitable that the contrast with Gertie, who was such a picture of health, should cross his mind. Of course, he reminded himself, she was younger than Florence by perhaps two decades. Florence was forty-five. How old was Gertie? Twenty-four, twenty-five? In a trick that no doubt came from his long career as a writer, he slipped into a kind of trance in which he pretended that she, not Florence, was sitting here now, reading to him.

‘Thomas!’ she broke into his reverie. ‘Do you want me to go on?’

‘If you are happy to.’

‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘I was listening. I was thinking of Mr. Bennet.’

‘What were you thinking about him?’

‘O … nothing much.’

She read on awhile, and he did his best to pay attention, or to seem to do so, but his thoughts came and went of their own accord. He noted the sparkle of the whisky as he turned the glass; he noted the gleam of Wessex’s nose; he noted the shadows moving on the wall by his bed, among them two of Florence, each cast by a different oil lamp, one darker and stronger than the other. There was also his own double-shadow, shifting. It was common enough to see shadows as reminders of death, but what if they were more than that? What if shadows were owned not only by the quick but also by the dead, or if attached to one side of a shadow was the body of the living man, and to the other his dead self?

He explored the fancy that shadows lived outside time, possessing knowledge and consciousness; that they were not mute but had tongues, and could whisper what they knew of the invisible country beyond. It was a possible subject for a poem, the shadow soliloquising on its corporeal self, and if he had had the energy he would have fetched a pen.

Curious ideas such as these often entered the old man’s mind when Florence was reading. They were like clouds drifting in a clear sky; he enjoyed looking at their shapes and structures, without any sense that they had any great significance.

‘I think I shall stop now. Her sentences are so long.’ She put her hand to the stole. ‘My throat is a little painful tonight. I sometimes feel as if there is something still there.’

‘You should try whisky.’

‘I hate whisky. You know I hate the taste of whisky.’

The old man saw that he had said the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong tone. He kept quiet, which seemed the best course.

‘You don’t think there is anything still there?’ she asked anxiously.

‘I am sure there is not. If there were, the doctors would have found it.’

She closed the book and got up from her chair. She smoothed the front of her night-gown, turned down one of the oil lamps and seemed about to leave for her bedroom. Then she paused.

‘Thomas,’ she said, ‘I have been thinking about the trees. We must get them cut back this winter. This is the time to do it. This is the time.’

Although it was far from the first occasion on which she had spoken to him about the trees, the old man was perplexed. Why mention it now?

‘They are so oppressive,’ she went on. ‘Some of them are so big, when they sway in the wind they are so worrying. Imagine if one came down on the house. And they make the house so dark. They shut out the light, even at this time of year. We never see the sun!’

This was a very considerable exaggeration. The sun was low in November, but not so low that the trees hid it for the entire day.

‘They are not at all dangerous,’ he said. ‘I know they make a lot of noise, but they are in excellent health, according to Mr. Caddy. You shouldn’t worry about them; there is no need. They are perfectly safe.’