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.
LAWN SALE
When Frank walked through to the kitchen, glass crunched under his feet, and he sent knives, forks and spoons skittering across the linoleum. He turned on the light. Someone had broken in while he had been at the Legion. They had cut the wire screen and smashed the glass in the kitchen door. They must have emptied the drawers looking for silverware because the cutlery was all over the place.
Someone had also been in the front room. Whoever it was had knocked or pushed over the tailor’s dummy and the little table beside his armchair where he kept his reading glasses, book and coffee mug.
Suddenly afraid in case they were still in the house, Frank climbed on a stool to reach the high cupboard above the sink. There, at the back, where nobody would look beyond Joan’s unused baking dishes, cake tins and cookie cutters shaped like hearts and lions, lay his old service revolver wrapped in an oily cloth. He had smuggled it back from the war and kept it all these years. Kept it loaded, too.
With the gun in his hand, he felt safer as he checked the rest of the house. Slowly, with all the lights on, he climbed the stairs. They had broken the padlock on Joan’s room. Heart thumping, he turned on the light. When he saw the mess, he slumped against the wall.
They had emptied out all her dresser drawers, scattering underwear and trinkets all over the shiny pink coverlet on the bed. And it looked as if someone had swept off the lotions and perfumes from the dressing table right onto the floor. One of the caps must have come loose because he could smell Joan’s sharp, musky perfume.
The lacquered jewellery case, the one he had bought her in New York with the ballet dancer that spun to the ‘Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy’ when you opened it, lay silent and empty on the bed. Frank sat down, gun hanging between his legs. They’d taken all Joan’s jewellery. Why? The stuff obviously wasn’t valuable. Just trinkets, really. None of it could possibly be worth anything to them. They had even taken her wedding ring.
Frank remembered the day he bought it all those years ago: the fairground across the street from the small jeweller’s; the air filled with the smells of candyfloss and fried onions and the sounds of children laughing and squealing with delight. A little girl in a white frock with pink smocking had smiled at him as she passed by, one arm hugging a huge teddy bear and the other hand holding her mother’s. How light his heart had been. Inside, the ring was inscribed, ‘FRANK AND JOAN. 21 JULY 1946. NO GREATER LOVE.’ The bastards. It could mean nothing to them.
Listlessly, he checked his own room. Drawers pulled out, socks and underwear scattered on the bedclothes. Nothing worth stealing except the spare change he kept on his bedside table. Sure enough, it was gone, the $3.37 he had piled neatly into columns of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies last night.
They didn’t seem to have got far in the spare room, where he kept his war mementos. Maybe they got disturbed, scared by a sound, before they could open the lock on the cabinet. Anyway, everything was intact: his medals; the antique silver cigarette lighter that had never let him down; the bayonet; the Nazi armband; the tattered edition of Mein Kampf; the German dagger with the mother-of-pearl swastika inlaid in its handle.