‘Our client informs us that you intend to disown your son – our client entertains no uncertainty as to the sex of the child she is carrying – just as Mr Hardy disowned his. We draw your attention to the presumption of law that all children born in wedlock are the legitimate offspring of the husband, which presumption is not rebutted by the fact in itself of the wife’s adultery, in this case connived at and condoned by yourself. Our client is particularly concerned that you learn that your boy was conceived early in ’67 also, exactly one hundred years after Mr Hardy’s. She understands that you do not find anything amazing, but she wishes us to convey to you that on top of everything else, she thinks that that is.’

I immediately grasped something about the past (not just mine, anyone’s): it lacked dignity. Parents, family, skeletons in cupboards, hereditary diseases, curses, Atrean atrocities, fatal weaknesses of the line – it was all the stuff of low farce, not tragedy. The last person to have any right to self-respect was Adam; even Eve was compromised by a demeaning antecedence.

I tore up the letter from Sharon’s solicitors. Then I tore what had been sent to me the day before, including the photograph of Hardy’s despondent child. Then I tore Gertrude Bugler’s postcard which had simultaneously tied me up with de Sade and promised me the illusion of a fresh start. And only then did I fall to tearing the hair I couldn’t call my own.

Part Two

PART TWO

… a subtlist in emotions, he cultivated as under glasses strange and mournful pleasures that he would not willingly let die just at present… To be the vassal of her sweet will for a time – he demanded no more, and found solace in the contemplation of the soft miseries she caused him.

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

Chapter I

CHAPTER I

[1]

‘I WIRED A room for us at the Temperance Hotel,’ Jude told Sue Bridehead, after he’d given up his job and she’d given up her husband, and they were together at last on the 18.52 train from Melchester, due in at Aldbrickham at 21.59.

‘One?’

‘Yes – one.’

Sue bent her forehead against the corner of the compartment. ‘O Jude! I thought you might do it – but I didn’t mean that!’

‘So what, for fuck’s sake, did you mean?’ Hardy decided against letting him reply. (It was an unnecessary scruple in the event – the book got him into trouble anyway.)

‘Well!’ was all Jude was allowed to say instead. But he did get to say it twice. ‘Well!’ he said again. And then he stared, stultified, at the opposite and presumably vacant seat.