Julia Augusta Martin, first lady of Puddletown, with money and a manor but alas no children of her own, had been wont to take the baby and the not-so-baby-Hardy in her arms and onto her lap, allowing him to breathe her perfume and listen in to the frou-frou of her silken flounces, confusing him as to deference and passion, as to sex and breeding, as to passivity and love, and thereby making of the child a too-soon too-willing gallant, of the mother an unforgiving rival, and of the man a chaser after shadows, a besotted lover of every woman and of none.

One mother is more than enough for any man. He does well if he can work out where she belongs and keep her there. God knows how many Hardy saw dangling on the end of that rope hoisted high above Dorset County Prison.

But there is a further and more fearful explanation of what Tommy was looking at in the rain, and that is to be found, I believe, in the very nature of voyeurism (or scopophilia, if you so prefer) itself. It seems to me – and I am not expecting any resistance to what I have to say – that the scopophiliac sets about his business reversing the usual quid pro quo contract of human relations. Put simply, it is as if he says, ‘Now that you have shown me yours, be so good as to permit me to give you a glimpse of mine.’ The voyeur, in other words, is scarcely more than an exhibitionist with small confidence and limited opportunities. That being the case, what Thomas Hardy was really staring at that Saturday morning, passive, helpless, humiliated, exposed to public shame and ridicule up there in the drizzle, was himself. Strung up, not by the judicature and its officers, but by the wondrous strength of some governess, not unlike the one who, according to his misunderstanding of his mother’s observation, hung Mr Rush. He remembered that misunderstanding all his life. His mother had meant that the governess had led Rush, morally, to the rope. He had supposed that she had hoisted him up there, bodily, by brute female force. The word governess had that ring about it and the idea was not totally without foundation. There were women who could take a man in hand. Martha Brown had gone so far as to take an axe to hers. Julia Augusta Martin, thirty years Hardy’s senior, had dangled him on her knee. A man can develop a taste for that sort of thing: why shouldn’t he want to dangle some more?

I have to confess (since I am coming clean) that it is no mystery to me.

[2]