After Story by Larissa Behrendt

Author:Larissa Behrendt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2021-06-01T23:55:45+00:00

The bus pulled up at a red-brick house called Max Gate on the outskirts of Dorchester. Lionel said it was where Thomas Hardy had lived.

‘Who was Max Gate?’ I asked him.

‘It wasn’t a person. It was the name of a toll-gate once located here. The house is built on a Neolithic religious ground that has been dated back to 2000 BC. It was later a Roman burial site.’

‘There’d be a lot of old ghosts around here then,’ I said.

Lionel said Thomas Hardy treasured his privacy, ‘but a lot of famous people visited him here – Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, W.B. Yeats, James Barrie, Robert Graves and T.E. Lawrence, who was the real Lawrence of Arabia. Even the Prince of Wales came for tea.’

Lionel showed us around the house and then we went upstairs to the third-floor attic where, he said, Mrs Emma Hardy had lived.

‘It seems more fitting for a servant than mistress of a house,’ Celia observed.

‘Very odd,’ her sister agreed.

‘What was going on there?’ I asked Lionel as we walked downstairs again.

‘I think they were very much in love early on but as time went by they grew apart. Emma died in 1912 and Hardy married his secretary, Florence, two years later, though there’s always been much speculation about exactly when his relationship with her started.’

‘Malarky,’ I agreed. Everything gets complicated when feelings start to come into it.

‘It was rumoured that when the maid came to tell Hardy Emma was dying,’ Lionel said, ‘he simply told her to straighten her uniform. But he was clearly shaken and had Emma’s body brought down and placed in a coffin at the foot of his bed. It remained there for three days. Even though they’d been on bad terms, he went into a deep mourning for her, writing poems and eulogising their love. His second wife, Florence, indignant, described the poems as “a fiction in which their author has now come to believe”. She couldn’t accept there’d once been a relationship between Hardy and Emma different from the one she’d seen.’

‘Sounds like,’ I mentioned to Lionel, ‘he made both women miserable because when he was with one he wanted the other, always wanting the one he didn’t have.’

‘Maybe if they’d had a child, they would have been happier. It would have given her something to do and something to share,’ Mrs Finn said. ‘It could have eased the tension between them.’

I was quite surprised that she even said anything but Meredith jumped right in without missing a beat, ‘God, no. Children could have made it so much worse.’

Lionel said we should look in the garden where there was a druid stone and also where all the pets were buried. It made me think of my dogs – Polly and Milly and my little moggies – Mookie and Pud. I missed them and again wondered how Kiki was going, what she was up to. It felt strange not to know the small moments of her day, her comings and goings.

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