My holiday reading was Claire Tomalin's excellent biography of Thomas Hardy, bought on impulse during a recent visit to Hardy's ancestral home in Bockhampton, about three miles out of Dorchester. My reasons for reading it were a mixture of idle interest in Hardy's "Wessex", a love of his novels, and a definite curiosity about his marriages - especially his first, to Emma, which began with such ardour and delight, was carried on despite the opposition of their families, but which ended in bitterness and alienation.
I give my reasons lest you think I am so one-dimensional as to scan the indexes of books for references to cycling before I will read them. Believe me, it was entirely a surprise to learn that Emma and Thomas took to bicycles with a will in 1895 and 1896 respectively, when they were both in their mid-50s. "I have almost forgotten that there is such a pursuit as literature in the arduous study of - bicycling! - which my wife is making me learn to keep her company, she doing it rather well," Hardy wrote to a friend. He soon acquired "the loveliest 'Byke'", a Rover Cobb, and would easily manage 40 or 50 miles a day - once riding, in 1899, from Dorchester to Southampton to watch troops embarking for South Africa to fight in the Boer war.
Hardy made that trip alone, for that was the year Emma withdrew from the main bedroom in their Dorchester home, Max Gate, and set up her boudoir in the attic; it was the definitive event in their estrangement, which lasted until her death in 1912. Cycling, it seems, was one of the last things the couple succeeded in doing together. At least, that is Tomalin's cheerful assessment of their "camaraderie and shared enjoyment [in bicycling], because it is difficult to keep up a quarrel or a sulk as you pedal along country roads".
I wish I could agree, but my impression - experience, sometimes - is that sulks and quarrels between couples and family members in general can be kept up for miles. To be able to go at the same speed, in harmony and with mutual pleasure, is a rare gift. Often, one person can be seen irritably stamping forward on the pedals while a resentful other dawdles behind, going deliberately slower than necessary either to avoid the company of the first, or in an attempt to manipulate the other into having to stop and wait. Camaraderie if you're lucky, but marital and familial cycling expeditions are as likely to be fraught with strife as fun.
What worked for the Hardys may have been that, for a while, it was something that Emma, who had by then lost even her limited role as Thomas's literary amanuensis, could teach him. Cycling with your beloved is a challenge more emotional than physical, one that mirrors the fundamental dilemma for all partnerships: how to be in tandem but distinct, self-determining yet travelling as one. Figure out how to ride together and my guess is that you will also know how to be happy together. Sadly, Thomas and Emma went their separate ways.
