Not Safe After Dark: And Other Stories

by Peter Robinson

  Miss Eunice closed her eyes and pursed her cracked lips. “I don’t remember the exact year,” she said. “But it really doesn’t matter. You could look it up, if you wanted. It was the year the Queen was proclaimed Empress of India.”

  I happened to know that was in 1877. I have always had a good memory for historical dates. If my calculations were correct, Miss Teresa would have been about twenty-seven at the time. “Will you tell me what happened?” I asked.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Miss Eunice said rather sharply. “Teresa’s husband was a brute, a bully, and a drunkard. She wouldn’t have married him, had she had any choice in the matter. But her parents approved the match. He had his own small farm, you see, and they were only tenants. Teresa was a very intelligent girl, but that counted for nothing in those days. In fact, it was a positive disadvantage. As was her willfulness. Anyway, he used to beat her to within an inch of her life—where the bruises wouldn’t show, of course. One day she’d had enough of it, so she killed him.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She hit him with the poker from the fireplace and, after darkness had fallen, she buried him deep in the garden. She was afraid that if the matter went to court the authorities wouldn’t believe her and she would be hanged. She had no evidence, you see. And Jacob was a popular man among the other fellows of the village, as is so often the case with drunken brutes. And Teresa was terrified of being publicly hanged.”

  “But did no one suspect her?”

  Miss Eunice shook her head. “Jacob was constantly talking about leaving his wife and heading for the New World. He used to berate her for not bearing him any children—specifically sons—and threatened that one day she would wake up and he would be gone. Gone to another country to find a woman who could give him the children he wanted. He repeated these threats in the alehouse so often that no one in the entire county of Dorset could fail to know about them.”

  “So when he disappeared, everyone assumed he had followed through on his threats to leave her?”

  “Exactly. Oh, there were rumors that his wife had murdered him, of course. There always are when such mysteries occur.”

  Yes, I thought, remembering my conversation with Sid Ferris one cold desert night ten years ago: rumors and fancies, the stuff of fiction. And something about a third person seen fleeing from the scene. Well, that could wait.

  “Teresa stayed on at the farm for another ten years,” Miss Eunice went on. “Then she sold up and went to America. It was a brave move, but Teresa no more lacked for courage than she did for beauty. She was in her late thirties then, and even after a hard life, she could still turn heads. In New York, she landed on her feet and eventually married a financier. Sam Cotter. A good man. She also took a companion.”

  “You?” I asked.

  Miss Eunice nodded. “Yes. Some years later Sam died of a stroke. We stayed on in New York for a while, but we grew increasingly homesick. We came back finally in 1919, just after the Great War. For obvious reasons, Teresa didn’t want to live anywhere near Dorset, so we settled in Yorkshire.”

  “A remarkable tale,” I said.

  “But that’s not all,” Miss Eunice went on, pausing only to sip some tea. “There was a child.”

  “I thought you said—”

  She took one hand off her stick and held it up, palm out. “Christopher, please let me tell the story in my own way. Then it will be yours to do with as you wish. You have no idea how difficult this is for me.” She paused and stared down at the brass lion’s head for so long I feared she had fallen asleep, or died. Outside in the market square a butcher was loudly trying to sell a leg of mutton. Just as I was about to go over to Miss Eunice, she stirred. “There was a child,” she repeated. “When Teresa was fifteen, she gave birth to a child. It was a difficult birth. She was never able to bear any other children.”

  “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 clamor 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 alehouse, 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 toward her, but she stretched out her hand. “No, no. I’m all right, Christopher. Please sit.”

  A motorcar 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 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, grays, 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 jewelery 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 jewelery. 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 jeweler’s; the air filled with the smells of candy floss 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. JULY 21 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.

  Frank went downstairs and considered what to do. He knew he should put the gun back in its hiding place and call the police. But that would mean intrusion, questions. He valued his privacy and he knew that the neighbors thought he was a bit of an oddball. What would the police think of him, a man who kept the torso of a tailor’s dummy in his living room, along with yards of moth-eaten material and tissue-paper patterns? What if they found his gun?

  No, he couldn’t call the police; he couldn’t have them trampling all over his house. They never caught burglars, anyway; everyone knew that. Weary, and still a little frightened, Frank nailed a piece of plywood over the broken glass, then carried his gun upstairs with him to bed.

  * * *

  The following morning was one of those light, airy days of early June, the kind that brings the whole city to the beaches. The sky was robin’s-egg blue, the sun shone like a pale yolk, and a light breeze blew off the lake to keep the temperature comfortable. In the gardens, apple and cherry blossom clung to the trees and the tulips were still in full bloom. It was a day for sprinklers, swimsuits, barbecues, bicycle rides, volleyball, and lawn sales.

  Normally, Frank would have gone down to the boardwalk, about the only exercise he got these days. Today, however, a change had come over him; a shadow had crept into his life and chilled him to the bone, despite the fine weather. He felt a deep lassitude and mal
aise. So much so that he delayed getting out of bed.

  Maybe it was the dream that made him feel that way. Though perhaps it wasn’t right to call it a dream when it was so close to something that had really happened. It recurred every few months, and he had come to accept it now, much as one accepts the chronic pain of an old wound, as a kind of cross to bear.

  Separated from his unit once in rural France during the Second World War, he had dragged himself out of a muddy stream, cigarettes tied up safely in army-issue condoms to keep them dry, and entered a forest. A few yards in, he had come face-to-face with a young German soldier, who looked as if he had also probably lost his comrades. They stared open-mouthed at each other for the split second before Frank, operating purely on survival instinct, aimed his revolver first and fired. The boy simply looked surprised and disappointed at the red patch that spread over his chest, then his face emptied of all expression forever. Light-headed and numb, Frank moved on, looking for his unit.

  It wasn’t the first German he had killed, but it was the first he had looked in the eye. The incident haunted him all the way back to his unit, but a few hours later he had convinced himself that he had done the right thing and put it behind him.

  After the war the memory surfaced from time to time in dreams. Details changed, of course. Each time the soldier had a different face, for example. Once, Frank even reached forward and put his finger into the bullet hole. The soft, warm flesh felt like half-set jelly. He was sure he had never touched it in real life.

  Another time, the boy spoke to him. He spoke in English and Frank couldn’t remember what he said, though he was sure it was a poem, and the words “I knew you in this dark” stuck in his mind. But Frank knew nothing of poetry.

  This time the bullet had gone straight through, leaving a clean circle the size of a ring, and Frank had seen a winter landscape, all flat white and gray, through the hole.

  He still had the gun he had used that day. It was the same one he had got down from the high cupboard last night when he thought the burglars might still be in the house. It was the one he felt for now under the pillow beside him.