Tess Read Online Free PDF Page B

hundred, just as they did at the time of the first count, in 1591), and to keep them in seven pens until they are old enough and strong enough not to be drowned.
    They will then be further protected by the best pairs of swans who will acquire most young.
    This rearing is the only unnatural event in the swans’ lives. They are fed at this time but thereafter are free to feed as they please (zostera and sea lettuce). They aren’t pinioned: the good, natural food of the Fleet keeps them there. In summer there are about five hundred – and double that in December, when the swannery is closed to visitors.
    And – I say – as Baby Tess sleeps at last in the carry-cot at my feet and I pick up a shell and hold it near her blue-white ear – the gales from the north blow over snow geese, sometimes, and ospreys too.
    â€“ Ospreys are extinct, Ella says in the cross voice of a child who, in truth, is missing school.

Going all the Way
    The Mill has a great room at first-floor level, with the millwheel in the centre and all the old beams in the roof, which at the southern end of the room are so low they can give you a bad knock on the head if you aren’t careful.
    On the morning of 21st September, 1963, at nine o’clock, that’s exactly what my father did: he hit his head on a beam and he wept – but whether it was from real pain or from the knowledge that his daughter Tess had got pregnant by a man, it would be hard to say.
    I stood there staring at him.
    I couldn’t for the life of me understand why my mother had told him, at all. It was a secret between us.
    Pity the daughter who can have no secrets with her mother.
    The child of happy parents is an orphan. And, although my father loved the swans, and sometimes hardly saw my mother in daylight for months on end, she told him everything.
    So I stood there gaping, as my father wept. I didn’t know until much later that my mother, just for this once, hadn’t told him everything. Not by any means.
    Like the boat trip she knew she would take with Tess when it all became too much to bear, down the coast and against the ferocious current of Chesil Beach, all the way to West Bay.
    For now, though:
    â€“ Where
is
Tess? says my father in a full voice when he has finished crying.
    His pain and disappointment were terrible to see. But it wasn’t the first time I’d seen them. For my father, while struggling to join the modern world, had all his life been firmly rooted as any Victorian in the old values.
    I don’t think he once noticed the chemical calendar on the wallof the bathroom in our creaking old house: the Pill, pinned in its plastic space bubble to the wall, for Tess to take (not me, not yet, even in 1963).
    I don’t think my father, either, had accepted Tess’s life since she had startled him by growing breasts and slamming the door of her room in his face, and playing ‘Mr Tangerine Man’ until the sound came out of the walls and seeped right into the quiet valley by the walls of the Old Barn at Abbotsbury.
    And after, he’d know, of course, that Tess had had a baby by Alec, and Alec had buggered off.
    But he’d only know it in some intellectual way, not really, right down inside himself. Tess was still his little girl, who lived in the shadow of the chapel of St Catherine, patron saint of spinsters.
    He used to tease both his daughters about that, my poor father.
    No wonder Tess was fucking Alec right from the age of fourteen and sometimes in the Old Mill itself, at dead of night, when my father was asleep, dreaming of his swans and their big, ungainly bodies which he handled so carefully you’d think he was carrying his own children instead of birds.
    Tess wouldn’t let him touch her any more.
    And, as she grew into a more and more beautiful swan, I stayed the ugly duckling. I was glad of my father’s attentions – but as Tess grew away from him, and the invisible (to him) Pill