Peter Robinson - Not Safe After Dark

‘What happened to this child?’

‘Teresa had a sister called Alice, living in Dorchester. Alice was five years older and already married with two children. Just before the pregnancy started to show, both Teresa and Alice went to stay with relatives in Cornwall for a few months, after it had been falsely announced that Alice was with child again. You would be surprised how often such things happened. When they came back, Alice had a fine baby girl.’

‘Who was the father?’

‘Teresa would never say. The one thing she did make clear was that no one had forced unwanted attentions on her, that the child was the result of a love match, an infatuation. It certainly wasn’t Jacob Morgan.’

‘Did she ever see the child again?’

‘Oh, certainly. What could be more natural than visiting one’s sister and seeing one’s niece grow up? When the girl was a little older, she began to pay visits to the farm, too.’ Miss Eunice stopped here and frowned so hard I thought her brow would crack like dry paper. ‘That was when the problems began,’ she said quietly.

‘What problems?’

Miss Eunice put her stick aside and held out her teacup. I refilled it. Her hands steady now, she held the cup against her scrawny chest as if its heat were the only thing keeping her alive. ‘This is the most difficult part,’ she said in a faint voice. ‘The part I didn’t know whether I could ever tell anyone.’

‘If you don’t wish-’

She waved my objection aside. ‘It’s all right, Christopher, I didn’t know how much I could tell you before I came here, but I know now. I’ve come this far. I can’t go back now. Just give me a few moments to collect myself.’

Outside, the market was in full swing and during the ensuing silence I could hear the clamour of voices selling and buying, arguing over prices.

‘Did I ever tell you that Teresa was an extremely beautiful young girl?’ Miss Eunice asked after a while.

‘I believe you mentioned it, yes.’

She nodded. ‘Well, she was. And so was her daughter. When she began coming by herself to the house, she was about twelve or thirteen years of age. Jacob didn’t fail to notice her, how well she was “filling out” as he used to say. One day Teresa had gone into the village for firewood and the child arrived in her absence. Jacob, just home from the ale house, was there alone to greet her. Need I say more, Mr Riley?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t mean to excuse him in any way, but I’m assuming he didn’t know the girl was his stepdaughter?’

‘That is correct. He never knew. Nor did she know Teresa was her mother. Not until much later.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Teresa came in before her husband could have his way with the struggling, half-naked child. Everything else was as I said. She picked up the poker and hit him on the head. Not once, but six times. Then they cleaned up and waited until after dark and buried him deep in the garden. She sent her daughter back to her sister’s and carried on as if her husband had simply left her, just as he had threatened to do.’

So the daughter was the mysterious third person seen leaving the farm in Sid Ferris’s account. ‘What became of the poor child?’ I asked.

Miss Eunice paused again and seemed to struggle for breath. She turned terribly pale. I got up and moved towards her, but she stretched out her hand. ‘No, no. I’m all right, Christopher. Please sit.’

A motor car honked outside and one of the street vendors yelled a curse. Miss Eunice patted her chest. ‘That’s better. I’m fine now, really I am. Just a minor spasm. But I do feel ashamed. I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely truthful with you. It’s so difficult. You see, I was, I am , that child.’

For a moment my mouth just seemed to flap open and shut and I couldn’t speak. Finally, I managed to stammer, ‘You? You are Miss Teresa’s daughter? But you can’t be. That’s not possible.’

‘I didn’t mean to shock you,’ she went on softly, ‘but, really, you only have yourself to blame. When people see two old ladies together, all they see is two old ladies. When you first began calling on us at Rose Cottage fifteen years ago, Teresa was ninety and I was seventy-six. I doubt a fifteen-year-old boy could tell the difference. Nor could most people. And Teresa was always remarkably robust and well preserved.’

When I had regained my composure, I asked her to continue.

‘There is very little left to say. I helped my mother kill Jacob Morgan and bury him. And we didn’t cut him up into little pieces. That part is pure fiction invented by scurrilous gossipmongers. My foster parents died within a short time of one another, around the turn of the century, and Teresa wired me the money to come and live with her in New York. I had never married, so I had no ties to break. I think that experience with Jacob Morgan, brief and inconclusive as it was, must have given me a lifelong aversion to marital relations. Anyway, it was in New York that Teresa told me she was really my mother. She couldn’t tell Sam, of course, so I remained there as her companion, and we always lived more as friends than as mother and daughter.’ She smiled. ‘When we came back to England, we chose to live as two spinsters, the kind of relationship nobody really questions in a village because it would be in bad taste to do so.’

‘How did the police find you after so long?’

‘We never hid our identities. Nor did we hide our whereabouts. We bought Rose Cottage through a local solicitor before we returned from America, so it was listed as our address on the all the official papers we filled in.’ She shrugged. ‘The police soon recognized that Teresa was far too frail to question, let alone put on trial, so they let the matter drop. And to be quite honest, they didn’t really have enough evidence, you know. You didn’t know it – and Teresa would never have told you – but she already knew she was dying before the police came. Just as I know I am dying now.’

‘And did she really die without telling you who your father was?’

Miss Eunice nodded. ‘I wasn’t lying about that. But I always had my suspicions.’ Her eyes sparkled for a moment, the way a fizzy drink does when you pour it. ‘You know, Teresa was always unreasonably jealous of that Tryphena Sparks, and Mr Hardy did have an eye for the young girls.’

Forty years have passed since Miss Eunice’s death, and I have lived in many towns and villages in many countries of the world. Though I have often thought of the tale she told me, I have never been moved to commit it to paper until today.

Two weeks ago, I moved back to Lyndgarth, and as I was unpacking I came across that first edition of Far from the Madding Crowd . 1874: the year Hardy married Emma Gifford. As I puzzled again over the inscription, words suddenly began to form themselves effortlessly in front of my eyes, and all I had to do was copy them down.

Now that I have finished, I suddenly feel very tired. It is a hot day, and the heat haze has muted the greens, greys and browns of the steep hillsides. Looking out of my window, I can see the tourists lounging on the village green. The young men are stripped to the waist, some bearing tattoos of butterflies and angels across their shoulder blades; the girls sit with them in shorts and T-shirts, laughing, eating sandwiches, drinking from pop or beer bottles.

One young girl notices me watching and waves cheekily, probably thinking I’m an old pervert, and as I wave back I think of another writer – a far, far greater writer than I could ever be – sitting at his window seat writing. He looks out of the window and sees the beautiful young girl passing through the woods at the bottom of the garden. He waves. She waves back. And she lingers, picking wild flowers, as he puts aside his novel and walks out into the warm summer air to meet her.