Winter. Christopher Nicholson

to London, where they would be among people of their own class and education.

      Everything in this offended him deeply, even if he took care not to show it. The house did not, he thought, merit such an attack, and nor did the worthy folk of the town and its surrounding villages deserve to be dismissed in such terms. Among them were old friends and acquaintances, not to mention relatives, whom he had known his entire life; to him they were intensely interesting.

      As for returning to London, he could scarcely have been more strongly opposed. True, there was a good deal to be said in favour of London, but even more on the other side. When he and Emma had last made their home in the city, when they had lived in the convenient suburban locality of Tooting – their house overlooking the Common – he had fallen so gravely ill that for a time the doctors, who seemed unable to decide whether he was suffering from a kidney stone, an internal haemorrhage, or some altogether different malady, had doubted that he would live. As he lay in what might have been his death-bed, with a strange glare of light in the room from the snow which, although it was October, had fallen a few days before and was now slowly melting, the countryside had beckoned him with a series of alluring, radiant images and he had understood that he and the city, for all its glitter, would never be wholly reconciled.

      Emma had felt the same; she had been delighted to move back to Dorsetshire. Now, it seemed, she had changed her mind! The fickleness of women! Well, he had no intention of leaving. Here he was, and with quantities of novelistic material at hand. Even now, he was brooding on his next story – that of a beautiful young countrywoman destroyed by Fate – which, he thought, might be his best yet. To return to London would be fatal.

      Thus the tea which he and his wife took that birthday afternoon on the sunlit lawn, and which, to an observer positioned some distance away and having no knowledge with which to interpret the scene, would have seemed an expression of a warm and harmonious marriage, was in reality a chilly affair in which few words were exchanged between the man and woman.

      Towards the end of it Emma had returned to the subject that divided them.

      ‘I must ask you to change your mind, Thomas,’ she had stated in a peremptory tone.

      ‘If by that you mean that we should move back to London, I cannot,’ was his reply.

      ‘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,