‘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.

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.

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 neighbours 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 malaise. So much so that he delayed getting out of bed.

Maybe it was the dream 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 for ever. Light-headed and numb, Frank moved on, looking for his unit.