Tess by Emma Tennant Page A

came out of the mouths of women, as they passed their secrets – precisely – by word of mouth.
    In the beginning of our lesson, Ella–
    For here you are now, holding up a book at me, frowning at the task your mother has set for you.
    â€“ Mum says can you go into Dorchester for her tomorrow and get some more of these?
    As we go into the Mill, Ella holds out the guidebook. In the kiosk by the swannery where her mother sits all day, selling postcards, and lobelias in pots from the tropical gardens, and entrance tickets, these guides go like hot cakes. And this year, for no reason that anyone can give, the swannery will be open beyond the equinox, right to the end of October. (Putting profit before safety, say the Nasebury folk; when the seas come up and threaten to spill over Chesil Beach at the time of the autumn gales, children have been known to get trapped on the high ridge of shingle and, every few years, one drowns. So the enclosure is securely locked and the birds left to their migration across the Fleet in private. Not this year, though. Tourism, the Heritage business, is big business in west Dorset these days, and the late sun brings coachloads to see the wooden pens abutting the Fleet, and to catch a glimpse of the swanherd, in his post held down the generations for over six hundred years at Abbotsbury Swannery.)
    I almost tell Ella that it’s not worth giving visitors the guidebooks they put out. For if anything’s an example of dead history, it’s whatthey write. But there’s no sense in upsetting her poor mother; and I say I will. (If I can, I add under my breath. If I’m still here. But I must still be here, to tell the tale.)
    And, as Ella goes up to take Baby Tess arid lay her down in her cot – and as she looks round the familiar room and adds the new baby – miraculously arrived as she had always somehow known they did – to the faded old sofa by the fire, and the kitchen table at the far end by the door out into the night garden, the table laid with a lino cloth and a fresh egg for her tea – and as she looks round the long room again, with its low beams and its collection of bric-à-brac and flotsam that no one moved away when one after another my parents departed, I see her begin to try and make sense of history.
    She sees my parents’ history: the piece of driftwood that looks like a leg broken off at the knee, or an arm and fist, so gnarled and veined it could be painted by Dürer – it lies on the sill and my father brought it in one day; it was washed up on Chesil Bank and for some reason it caught his fancy.
    The lump of stone from the River Brit, in the Marshwood Vale where all your foremothers come from, little Tess, that my mother found and said had gold in it. My father laughed; but when you pour water on it the gold gleams – the stone is as veined as the wood, but with a living ore from millions of years ago. My father’s wood is a dead thing.
    I see her looking at the quilt my mother made, that was on her bed and is now covering Baby Tess; and I see her frown again, in the effort to understand generation, continuity, the nameless beauty of women’s work down the centuries: embroidery, tapestry, patchwork, samplers, homilies, stitches of prayer. She sees, in this room, the labours of my poor mother – as she waited for my father, out to all hours, up to the thighs in waders, on shores dotted with sleeping white birds; and in the quilt she sees the gold my mother wove from her pile of worthless straw.
    For the moment, Ella, you’re happy as you walk to the table and lift from the brown egg the cosy my mother knitted when she was in hospital having Tess – and she’d gone in in such a hurry she’d picked up the wrong bag of wool and there was only enough for anegg cosy (a bad omen some of the nurses said). You slice the top off with a knife. You’re smiling now – and something in the sudden