Drowned lives, p.11
Drowned Lives, page 11
While I was in the kitchen, I cursed myself for not locking the back door. Rachel had been a regular visitor to the house while my mother was alive, and later on had called on my father occasionally. Since I’d been on my own, she’d used every pretext to get back into the house. She knew every detail of my life.
‘Doesn’t your mother look lovely in her wedding dress,’ she said.
‘Does she?’
She was gazing with a fond wistfulness at my parents’ wedding photos. I thought my father looked ridiculous in his tight trousers, narrow tie and pointy-toed shoes, with his quiff sticking up from his forehead like an early Cliff Richard. It was 1963, there was still a Conservative government and the Beatles hadn’t yet had time to make an impact on fashions. If it had been a few years later, my father would have been sporting wide lapels, a fringe and a droopy moustache. I came along in 1965, when Harold Wilson was prime minister, American planes were starting to bomb Vietnam, and Rhodesia was declaring UDI.
In the photograph of the group outside St Chad’s church, my mother had a long, straight bob – but, apart from that, she could have been a bride from any era in that traditional white lace gown. As to whether she looked lovely, I was the wrong person to judge. She was just my mother.
‘There’s snow on the ground,’ said Rachel. ‘They must have got married in winter.’
‘February.’
‘Was that a bad winter?’
‘I wasn’t actually there, you know. I wasn’t even born. That was the way things were done in those days. Wedding first, babies later.’
She looked at me sideways. ‘Yes, but it’s the sort of detail you get to know, isn’t it?’
‘Not me.’
Yes, it had been a bad winter in 1962–63. The Minster Pool had frozen over and snow had turned Beacon Park into a vast Arctic waste, stranding the statue of Captain Smith of the Titanic in a snowfield that was normally the Museum Gardens. Birds had frozen to death in the trees, and villages had been cut off for days. My father once said it had reminded everyone of the winter of 1947, when Lichfield had relied on two horse-drawn snow ploughs to clear the streets.
But these weren’t only things I knew. They were family memories. They came with the remembered sound of my father’s voice. They were brought back by the sight and feel of the photographs, by the evocative but unidentifiable smell released from the musty depths of the suitcase.
‘And this must be you as a little boy.’
Rachel was thumbing through the photographs again, turning over pictures of me standing in the back garden at Stowe Pool Lane, wearing knee-length shorts and a short back and sides. Then there was me on a bike in my school uniform, with a satchel on my back. And there was another me, the older teenager in jeans and a Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt, growing sideboards and trying to look like my Wolves hero, Derek Dougan.
The photos were starting to make me feel uncomfortable. To me, the past was an unpleasant necessity, not something to rake over and dissect with that awful mixture of mockery and fascination. It was if I’d spread my dirty underwear on the table for her to paw through.
Now she was laughing. ‘I bet you were a real pain in the neck when you were that age.’
I said nothing while I drank my tea. She looked up at me, and mimed an exaggeratedly apologetic expression. ‘I’m sorry, Chris – you were looking for something, weren’t you? And I’m interfering as usual. Just tell me if I’m being a pain in the neck, and I’ll go.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No, no. Come on, what was it you were looking for? A nice picture of your mum and dad, perhaps. Was that what you wanted? Something to frame on the sideboard?’
What I really wanted was to grab the big wedding day groups and scan the massed ranks of relatives for a face that resembled the old man I’d met one morning at Fosseway. And I wanted to pull open the folded, yellowing envelope that Rachel hadn’t noticed yet. I knew it contained a few older photographs, the tiny, square sepia-coloured ones that were the only surviving images of my grandparents on my father’s side.
My Grandfather Buckley had died when my father was a boy – that much I knew. I couldn’t even picture his face, and I desperately needed to search it for resemblances to the man who claimed to have been his brother, my Great-Uncle Samuel. There might even be evidence of the existence of Samuel himself. Could there possibly be a snap of George and Samuel together? There were photos in that envelope of people who’d never been identified to me, grim-faced men and women in old-fashioned, ill-fitting clothes who stared at the camera as if the lens might steal their souls.
Rachel must have been psychic, or perhaps she’d seen my eyes stray automatically towards the envelope.
‘Ah, what’s this?’
The next second, there they were, spilled in a casual muddle on the table. Faded images of unfamiliar faces. A spasm of pain took me unawares and made me catch my breath as I looked down at a picture of my father, aged about seven, uncomfortably turned out in his Sunday best for a parade of some kind. His hair was cropped at the sides, with a longer lock flopping onto his forehead. He looked scrubbed and starched and vaguely resentful in his baggy shorts, and his bare legs were scrawny and pitiful. One of his socks had started to slip and crumple on his shin. Trembling with an inexplicable emotion, I picked up the photograph and turned it over. On the back, in washed-out black ink, it said: ‘Arthur. Visit by Queen Elizabeth, 1946’.
The next snap showed my father again a few years later, a gawky boy in a white open-necked shirt, sitting with a group of adults. All the men were in ties and braces, the women in flowered dresses, enjoying the sunshine on an outing somewhere. ‘Whitsun 1949’ said the scrawl. There was a solitary portrait of my grandfather, George Buckley, from about the same period. He was standing proudly outside his back door in polished boots and a dark suit, solemn and upright, a pipe clenched in his teeth and not a hint of a smile. There was undoubtedly a look about his eyes and nose that reminded me of the old man who’d claimed to be his brother.
But I knew how easy it was to convince yourself of these resemblances. How often had I heard people cooing over a month-old baby, finding its father’s eyes, its mother’s hair. Once, I’d been horribly embarrassed after remarking to a couple I was interviewing that their son looked just like his father – only to be told that the child was adopted.
‘This George,’ said Rachel, reading the back of the photo. ‘He was a fine-looking man.’
‘My grandfather.’
‘Mmm.’
I knew she could sense my tension. She was far too sharp to miss the change in my mood.
‘Did you ever know him?’
‘No, he died a long time ago.’
‘And why is he on his own?’ she said. ‘Where’s your grandmother, I wonder?’
‘I don’t know.’
She was right. It did look a bit odd. It was the kind of photograph you’d expect to include a couple, a posed portrait of Grandma and Granddad for the family album. But there was no sign of Grandma. No portrait of Mary Buckley. I looked at the group photo, but there was no way to identify her among the other women.
‘Have you any other living relatives on that side of the family?’ asked Rachel.
I was waiting anxiously for her to turn up the next photograph. But when I didn’t answer her question, she looked at me keenly, as if she could see right through me.
‘Well, have you?’ she said.
And then it all came out. Rachel was fascinated, and grew excited as she listened. Her response made me feel better. Being able to tell somebody about it, talking it through out loud, made the situation clearer in my mind. And once I’d told Rachel, there no longer seemed to be any doubt in my heart that the old man I’d met really was my Great-Uncle Samuel. It seemed right for the first time.
‘But that’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘A long-lost relative. It’s like a fairy story. But how sad that he died.’
‘Sad, yes.’
‘I’d have loved to have met him. Properly, I mean. I didn’t know who he was when he came that day.’
She put the photograph of my Grandfather Buckley aside, and I could see the next picture in the pile. It was almost the last one, and it showed two boys with similar serious expressions. One of them looked about twelve or thirteen, the other a few years younger. They were leaning against a heavy wooden beam, like the balance beam of a canal lock gate. They both wore stout boots and flannel trousers, their hands thrust deep into their pockets, and the older one had a flat cap at a jaunty angle. The caption read: George and Samuel, June 1925.
‘I researched my family tree a few years ago,’ said Rachel. ‘It was fascinating. There’s an amazing amount of information you can find, but you need to know where to look, or it can take forever. I joined the local family history society for a while. If you’re thinking of researching your tree, Chris, I wouldn’t mind helping – if you want.’
I remembered that Rachel had been a librarian. She’d gone back to her career after the divorce, but her part-time job at a branch library had disappeared in the cutbacks. At one time, as an Information Officer, I’d been responsible for justifying those cuts to the public. Now we were in the same boat. The knife that had made those cuts had turned on me.
But there was no way I could agree to what she was suggesting. The thought of my next-door neighbour burrowing through my family’s past repulsed me. I started to regret having told her anything. I wished I’d found the strength of will to keep my mouth shut and ask her to leave before it went so far. Suddenly, the whole exercise seemed pointless and self-obsessed, and it was Rachel’s fault for dragging me into it.
‘No, I won’t be doing anything like that, thanks,’ I said. ‘Look, the reason I’m going through this material – it’s not because of an interest in my family history, or out of loyalty to Samuel Longden. It’s not even because I feel guilty.’
‘I never said it was.’
‘The only reason I’m going to do anything at all is because I’m being paid for it. You see? I have to earn a living, and if that means raking through the lives of the long dead, then so be it.’
I began to gather the photographs together and stuff them back into their envelopes. I plucked the picture of George and Samuel from her fingers and tossed it in with the rest as if it was of no importance. Rachel looked a bit hurt.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘I’ve got other things to do. If you don’t mind …’
She got up, flushing slightly. ‘That’s okay. I’ve got to go out myself. I’ll be calling at Tesco’s, if you want anything fetching.’
‘No thanks. I’m doing my own shopping later. I usually go to Safeway.’
‘Fine. Fine.’
I got her as far as the front door before she tried again. There was a hint of desperation in her voice, a pleading note that made me grit my teeth. ‘You won’t be wanting me to help, then?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Then I cursed myself for not being definite. ‘No, I’m sure I won’t. Thanks all the same.’
Her shoulders sagged. ‘Well, you know where to find me, if you change your mind. I’m not exactly a million miles away.’
Finally, I got her out of the door and down the path with a few perfunctory words of farewell. I bundled the packets of photos together and shoved them into a drawer of the mahogany sideboard, stuffed well in among the place mats and spare fuses and God knows what else my parents had collected. One day I would really have to clear it all out. Perhaps I should look at the small ads in the Echo to find somebody who did house clearances. Let strangers shift the lot and do whatever they wanted with it. I could make a fresh start, clear the house of memories.
Boswell wandered into the room, right on cue. I thought of him as my parents’ cat, but in reality my father had never been able to stand him. Boswell had been restricted to the back garden and the kitchen, except when my mother let him sneak onto her chair while Dad was out. Now, the cat had full run of the house.
For the past three months, I’d known there was something deep and painful that my father had left in me, a splinter of memory festering under the skin, lodged in a place I couldn’t easily reach. It was the cause of the constant dull ache in my heart that sometimes flared into those jagged twinges of agony that hit me when I saw the photographs of him as a boy. It was a pain that I couldn’t cure until I’d erased him completely from my life.
16
It wasn’t unusual for me to take a walk on Sunday morning. Normally I took a route down Gaia Lane towards Beacon Street. There were lots of new houses here, discreetly set behind walls and hedges, some built of red brick that blended with the older properties. Speed humps controlled the traffic, and the pavements were narrow. Trees overhung the road, and grey squirrels scattered dead leaves on the sheltered drives. Sometimes I turned northwards to the corner of Curborough Road, which led out to the estates of Chadsmead and Nether Stowe, built to accommodate the population explosion that Lichfield had undergone in the 1960s and ’70s.
But in the middle section of Gaia Lane there were enclosed walks through to Cathedral Close and the playing fields. I had to pass some of the other Victorian semis. Their frontages were similar to Maybank, but none of them had a Russian vine like the one my mother had planted in the front garden, which now climbed over the roof and halfway up the chimney, clutching the fabric of the house ever more tightly in its spreading tendrils.
At Stowe Pool, sloping concrete sides ran down to the water, where the bank was occupied by a solitary angler. The sun was still low and glaring on the surface, and a stiff wind blew, swirling leaves around my feet.
The walk round the water prepared me for a visit to the graveyard. As the cold wind numbed my face and limbs, it also seemed to deaden my feelings, ready for the task of confronting my memories. The most recent section of the graveyard lay behind St Chad’s Church. There were rows of marble gravestones, black and grey, most of them with fresh flowers where the occupants were still remembered, but some with nothing but wilted stalks after only two or three years in the ground.
The sandstone facing of St Chad’s tower glowed almost pink this morning. As I passed the porch, a waft of polish reached me from the open door. I orientated myself towards a bright yellow skip that stood in a graveyard extension. The grass was neatly mown right up to the headstones, and I heard the sound of a strimmer from the opposite side of the graveyard. Some of the headstones were grouped together, with no visible graves. Space is at a premium in many graveyards these days. There isn’t room for too many dead people cluttering up our lives.
Although I hadn’t been to the graveyard for several months, I had no trouble finding the stone I wanted. It said: ‘In loving memory of’ on the top half, and the section below it was divided into two. My mother’s inscription was on one side – ‘a devoted wife and mother, Sheila Buckley, died August 1997 aged 60’. The other side had been left blank when she was buried. The design had been my father’s idea. But it hadn’t stayed blank for long, before his own name had filled it.
‘Well, Dad, you taught me about secrets. You said secrets were never to be told. I didn’t realise you were keeping other secrets too. Did they eat away at you like they did at me?’
Oh yes, there had been so many secrets. Not only the existence of my grandfather’s brother, which had been kept from me, but why Great-Uncle Samuel had changed his name. And since I’d read Samuel’s letter, I had an uneasy impression of a great, yawning hole in my family’s history where other mysteries lurked. I thought I might find some justification for what has been done to us. But I found none, he’d written. But what had been done? And who did he mean by us? The Buckleys? Yet Samuel had tried to distance himself from the Buckleys, to the extent of taking another name. Vengeance leads only to bitterness. Evil breeds evil.
I shook my head in bafflement. I knew all about betrayal and bitterness. But surely Samuel couldn’t mean me. He was talking about something that had happened much longer ago. He’d mentioned the year 1800. Two hundred years of bitterness and vengeance? It hardly seemed possible.
I’d been determined to look ahead to the future, but somehow the past kept intruding. Now I had to acknowledge that I’d been fighting a losing battle. The only way I was likely to have a future was by exploring the past, thanks to a ridiculous bequest from a long-lost relative. Despite my best efforts to avoid it, I’d have to confront the history of my own family. I’d have to open my eyes to what had formed me, the factors making me what I am.
I looked again at my father’s grave. Yes, bitterness and resentment could last for two hundred years, if you lived that long. But it couldn’t survive your death, could it? The stuff that Samuel had written about genetic memory was nonsense. I hadn’t inherited any memory from my father of a great wrong done to our family. Quite the opposite. If such wrongs had existed, he’d deliberately kept them from me.
Another picture of my father rose in my mind, unbidden. It was the image of him that I least wanted to see, the one I’d never been able to remove from my thoughts since those days as a child, when the meaning of evil had been imprinted on my memory. It might not be quite what Samuel had meant, but my father had passed on the meaning of betrayal, the taste of bitterness, the desire for vengeance. He’d done it in his own peculiar way. But he’d certainly done it effectively. Standing there by his grave, I knew that the feelings he’d planted in me had merely lain dormant, almost unacknowledged, for most of my adult years.
Perhaps Samuel was right, then. I couldn’t take revenge on my father. But if the evil could be explained, its power might be destroyed. If evil had bred evil, who had planted the seed?
I decided to assess the facts logically. Being realistic, what evidence did I have that the old man I’d met at Fosseway really was my Great-Uncle Samuel? True, I had the document Mr Elsworth had given me, testifying to Samuel’s name change. That seemed to give him some form of official status as a Buckley, even if he’d turned his back on the name. And why should he lie? I couldn’t see what he might gain from pretending to be my relative.
