Peter Robinson - Not Safe After Dark

When the answers to my letters started trickling in a couple of weeks after Tommy’s arrest, I picked up some more leads, one of which eventually led me to Midge Livesey, now a mother of two boys – both in the RAF – who was living only thirty miles away, in the country. I telephoned her, and she seemed pleased to hear from someone who had known Rose, though she was saddened by the news of Rose’s death, and she suggested I be her guest for the weekend.

Though it was late October, the weather was fine when I got off the train at the tiny station. It was a wonderful feeling to be out in the country again. I had been away for so long I had almost forgotten what the autumn leaves looked like and how many different varieties of birdsong there are. The sweet, acrid scent of burning leaves from someone’s garden made a fine change from the stink of the air raids.

Midge and her husband, Arthur, welcomed me at the door of their cottage and told me they had already prepared the spare room. After I had laid out my things on the bed, I opened the window. Directly outside stood an apple tree, and beyond that I could see the landscape undulating to the north, where the large anvil shapes of peaks and fells were visible in the distance. I took in a deep breath of fresh air – as deep as I could manage with my poor lungs – and for once it didn’t make me cough. Perhaps it was time I left the city, I thought. But no, there were police duties to attend to, and I loved my teaching job. After the war, perhaps, I would think about it again, see if I could get a job in a village school.

When I showed Midge the photograph of the three of them over dinner that evening, a sad smile played across her features, and she touched the surface with her fingers, as if it could send out some sort of message to her.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that was Rose. And that was Margaret. Poor Margaret, she died in childbirth ten years ago. The war wasn’t all bad for us. We d id have some good times. But I think the day that photograph was taken marked the beginning of the end. It was the day before the third Ypres battle started, and we were field nurses. We used to go onto the fields and into the trenches to clean up after the battles.’ She shook her head and looked at Arthur, who tenderly put his hand on top of hers. ‘You’ve never… well, I suppose you have.’ She looked at her husband. ‘Arthur understands, too. He was wounded at Arras. I worry about my boys. Just remembering, just thinking about it, makes me fear for them terribly. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She paused for a moment and poured us all tea. ‘Any -way, Rose was especially sensitive,’ she went on. ‘She wrote poetry and wanted to go to university to study English literature when it was all over. French, too. She spoke French very well and spent a lot of time talking to the poor wounded French soldiers. Often they were with the English, you know, and there was nobody could talk to them. Rose did. She fell in love with a handsome young English lieutenant. Nicholas, his name was.’ She smiled. ‘But we were young. We were always falling in love back then.’

‘What happened to her?’ I asked.

‘Rose? She broke under the strain. Shell shock, I suppose you’d call it. You hear a lot about the poor boys, the breakdowns, the self-inflicted wounds, but you never hear much about the women, do you? Where are we in the history books? We might not have been shooting at the Germans and only in minimal danger of getting shot at ourselves – though there were times – but we were there . We saw the slaughter first hand. We were up to our elbows in blood and guts. Some people just couldn’t take it, the way some of the boys couldn’t take combat. I’ll say this, though, I think it was Nicholas’s death that finally sent Rose over the edge. It was the following year, 1918, the end of March, near a little village on the Somme called St Quentin. She found him, you know, on the field. It was pure chance. Half his head had been blown away. She was never the same. She used to mutter to herself in French and go into long silences. Eventually, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of morphine, but a doctor found her in time. She was invalided out in the end.’

‘Do you know what happened next?’

‘I visited her as soon as the war was over. She’d just come out of the hospital and was living with her parents. They were wealthy landowners – very posh, you might say – and they hadn’t a clue what to do with her. She was an embarrassment to them. In the end they set up a small fund for her, so she would never have to go without, and left her to her own devices.’

After a moment or two’s silence, I showed Midge the book of poetry. Again, she fingered it like a blind person looking for meaning. ‘Oh, yes. Ivor Gurney. She was always reading this.’ She turned the pages. ‘This was her favourite.’ She read us a short poem called ‘Bach and the Sentry’, in which the poet on sentry duty hears his favourite Bach prelude in his imagination and wonders how he will feel later, when he actually plays the piece again in peacetime. Then she shook her head. ‘Poor mad Rose. Nobody knew what to do with her. Do tell me what became of her.’

I told her what I knew, which wasn’t much, though for some reason I held back the part about Tommy and his mistake. I didn’t want Midge to know that my godson had mistaken her friend for a traitor. It seemed enough to lay the blame at the feet of a gypsy thief and hope that Midge wasn’t one of those women who followed criminal trials closely in the newspapers.

Nor did I tell her that Rose’s house had been destroyed by a bomb almost a week after the murder and that she would almost certainly have been killed anyway. Midge didn’t need that kind of cruel irony. She had suffered enough; she had enough bad memories to fuel her nightmares, and enough to worry about in the shape of her two boys.

I simply told her that Rose was a very private person, certainly eccentric in her dress and her mannerisms, and that none of us really knew her very well. She was a part of the community, though, and we all mourned her loss.

So Mad Maggie was another of war’s victims, I thought, as I breathed in the scent of the apple tree before getting into bed that night. One of the uncelebrated ones. She came to our community to live out her days in anonymous grief and whatever inner peace she could scrounge for herself, her sole valuable possessions a book of poetry, an old photograph and a nursing medal.

And so she would have remained, a figure to be mocked by the children and ignored by the adults, had it not been for another damn war, another damaged soul and the same poppy field in Flanders.

Requiescat in pace , Rose, though I am not a religious man. Requiescat in pace .

It should never have happened, but they hanged Tommy Markham for the murder of Rose Faversham at Wands-worth Prison on 25 May 1941, at eight o’clock in the morning.

Everyone said Tommy should have got off for psychiatric reasons, but his barrister had a permanent hangover, and the judge had an irritable bowel. In addition, the expert psychiatrist hired to evaluate him didn’t know shell shock from an Oedipus complex.

The only thing we could console ourselves with was that Tommy went to the gallows proud and at peace with himself for having avenged his father’s death.

I hadn’t the heart to tell him that he was wrong about Mad Maggie, that she wasn’t the woman he thought she was.

I was absolutelyspeechless. After everything that had happened, there he stood, bold as brass, telling all the world we were going to be married. Married! You would have been speechless, too.