Tess Read Online Free PDF Page A

Priddle, down on the coarse sand the colour of a lion’s mane, which is only visible at low tide, had her knickers down in the waves and her left hand on a part of Victor that protruded, too, from his grey shorts like the soft head of an ammonite from its shell.
    No, it’s not like then. Men ‘got you pregnant’ and you had to ‘catch’ them or suffer the stigma of illegitimacy and shame.
    Was the primeval urge to give birth the reason Tess allowed the stone to be pushed into her – a reverse, you might say, from the condition of her progenitors, seventy billion years ago, where the stone carapace was a place to breed alone. Did she have this urge, so strongly even at the age of seven, that she would countenance Victor’s preposterous ‘game’ in the hope it would lead to the real thing?
    Tess didn’t know. Nor could anyone know. Something about the ‘game’ led them back all those millions of years to the first appearance of the male.
    And, like the first male, Victor strides and struts on the beach to attract the desire and attention of Tess. Without him, she cannot give birth.
    It’s different now, and Ella knows it. Ella’s question comes after seeing – whether she understands them or not – countless news stories on TV: surrogacy, artificial insemination, test-tube babies, drug fertility scandals with six or eight in a litter. Sperm banks, anonymous donors. Genetic engineering. Where do babies come from, Liza-Lu?
    We’re back in the Cretaceous age. With modern science we can reproduce by ourselves.
    But men are more powerful than we, and they will stop us – sooner or later. Very likely, sooner.
    Our power is now that we can do without them. Sperm can be frozen a thousand years. In a millennium’s time, it will be as if you, today, were the child of a silk weaver or a Saxon farmer – or a royal prince. In the here and now, we don’t need men any more.
    Not for physical strength: we protect ourselves against danger with electronic alarms and all-female services. Not for manufacturing and heavy engineering: the Industrial Revolution is over.
    But they won’t let us get away with it. Certainly not.
    It is they who must change and adapt.
    And us along with them, if we and the planet are to survive.
    So I say to Ella: Babies come from Love.
    And she looks up at me with that uncomfortably accusing squint – and sticks her tongue right out at me, in front of the vicar and assorted worthies as they leave the village shop.
    It could be true, I think, if the chain of desolation could be broken, with the coming of the new Baby Tess.

Crime and Punishment
    It looked at first like a bundle of old clothes, lying in the eelgrass by the edge of the lagoon.
    The swans had crossed the Fleet a few days before, and theirdeserted nests were higher than the body, which, in its coiled, uncomfortable position, was like one of those men found in a peat bog – unreal somehow, although obviously human.
    And my mother Mary Hewitt was poking at it with a stick – one of those long twigs, to be precise, that the swanherd brings in to help the birds build their nests. It was six in the morning and barely light: we’d just passed the equinox, and the gales had brought the sea right up to the height of Chesil Beach.
    Had the body been washed out to sea and then come in again with the equinoctial gales?
    Or had it been dumped there the night before, in the sand-fringed grass at the edge of the water?
    One thing was certain. There had been a thick fog earlier that night and no one could swear they’d heard the outboard engine of a small boat as it made its way up the coast to West Bay. Not Tess, or our mother, or me.
    So that was September 1969 – September the twenty-second – and my mother’s expression is something I’ll never forget. Even though I hadn’t been there at the time – even, as I knew but couldn’t