Drowned lives, p.7
Drowned Lives, page 7
When I left the house later on, Rachel was there as usual, timing her appearance to coincide with my departure.
‘Morning, number six. Are you all right?’
‘Yes, but I’m in a rush.’
‘I was wondering how you had got on with the files that Mr Longden left for you.’
‘Got on with them? I haven’t looked at them.’
‘You’re joking. Why not?’
‘I’ve got better things to do.’
‘Chris, surely you must have some curiosity?’
‘Of course I have. But all this stuff … it’s not something I can afford to spend my time on. They’re just the scribblings of some cranky old man.’
‘How do you know if you haven’t read them?’ she demanded.
‘Look, I’ve met an ancient eccentric who rambled on about a research project he wants me to help him with, and I’ve seen a great heap of files that he’s dumped on me totally uninvited. Therefore, the contents of those files are the scribblings of a cranky old man. No argument.’
‘They could be very interesting,’ she said.
‘You read them then.’
She dropped her rake. ‘All right.’
‘No, no,’ I said hastily, not having expected her to take me at my word. ‘You can’t. I’m giving them back to him today.’
‘What? But that’s terrible. He’ll be really upset.’
‘I don’t care.’
She looked prepared to continue the discussion right there and then on the pavement, but I didn’t have time. As I drove off in the Escort, I reflected that I ought to be grateful for Rachel’s interference. She’d pushed me into making a decision. I would take the files and the box back to Samuel Longden, and I’d do it tonight. I wouldn’t even consider looking at them any further.
After all, Samuel meant nothing to me. Why should I concern myself with someone else’s past? It was the future that was important.
Yet for the rest of that day, there was an impression I couldn’t get out of my head. It was an indistinct image of my grandmother, Mary Buckley. Whenever I thought about her, her figure seemed to blur and change, and I was unable to bring her into proper focus. I couldn’t decide whether it was an actual memory, or a false picture produced by my imagination after listening to Samuel Longden’s ramblings about her. Whichever it was, her ghostly presence was unnerving.
And Mary Buckley wasn’t someone else’s past. She was mine.
I collected my photos from Boots and dropped my article off at the Lichfield Echo, then wondered what else to do. I tried ringing Dan Hyde from a callbox, but there was no answer. There hadn’t been an update on winningbid.uk.com since we’d signed the lease on the office space, and I was starting to worry he might have found something else to spend money on without consulting me. Financial anxiety gnawed at me constantly now, and I needed some reassurance.
Instead, I found myself driving towards Stafford, where I walked into the county council offices to retrieve some notes and a contacts book from my desk, even though I was technically on leave. It had occurred to me they were items which might have disappeared if I waited until my last day.
I was met with desultory greetings and embarrassed silences. My departure was a fact known to everyone, though nobody had openly mentioned it to me yet. I’d ceased to mind all this. Once I got it into my head that I’d be going, it seemed completely inevitable. I was merely waiting out my time until the end. If I was very lucky, I might get a bottle of cheap wine and a pat on the back from the Information Manager, followed by a ‘good luck’ card covered in forged signatures for all the people who’d forgotten to sign it.
Some of these people I’d worked with for quite a while, and I knew them well. There were two guys from Planning I used to play squash with every week. I wasn’t sure when that had come to an end. Did they stop asking me, or had I lost interest? When I looked in their faces, I caught momentary glimpses of the good times we’d had after work, playing hard and laughing together, the way friends do. But it seemed like one more memory of the past now. What had happened to me?
In one drawer of my desk I found the remains of my last assignment – the proofs of some new leaflets that had been distributed to households explaining the council’s policy on recycling. They were filled with cartoons of compost makers and bottle banks with jolly, smiling faces, mouths gaping wide in their eagerness to dispose of your rubbish for you. Nowhere was there a mention of a facility for recycling human beings in an environmentally friendly way. Now, as ever, people were merely dumped on the scrapheap.
The first thing I did when I got back to Lichfield was collect all the files from the cupboard and the wooden box from under the sideboard and stack them on the table. Light from the window glinted on the brass and the single iron key. The two empty keyholes drew my eye as if tempting me to try them again. But I didn’t have the other keys, and I had no idea where to start looking for them. No one would be able to open this box, except perhaps Samuel himself. So he should have it back.
Well, there was no time like the present if I was going to do it. I looked up Samuel Longden’s phone number in the book, but there was no reply to my ring. No one wanted to speak to me today. I wasn’t in a mood to be put off by that, so I consulted my Staffordshire street map to locate his address in Whittington.
For once, I’d taken Rachel by surprise. She was nowhere to be seen as I turned the car onto Gaia Lane.
Ash Lodge was a tall, square-gabled house from the middle of the nineteenth century, its doorway shrouded with trees and hedges, and the drive covered in dead leaves. It stood in a quiet, narrow road that backed onto the Coventry Canal on the eastern side of Whittington.
I parked near the bottom of the drive and walked up to the door, crunching through the leaves. A high hawthorn hedge separated the garden of Ash Lodge from the next property, but through the bottom of the hedge I could see a neat gravelled drive that looked a good deal better kept than Samuel’s. Of course, Samuel didn’t have a car, so had little use for a drive.
I rapped a few times with a brass knocker, but couldn’t get any reply. There was a little electric bell push, but it produced no sound that I could hear from outside. I peered through one of the bay windows, seeing a room full of heavy furniture and a display cabinet packed with china. Most of it was Royal Doulton and Coalport, at a guess. I hoped Samuel had some decent security, because otherwise he was a sitting duck in this secluded spot.
When I went round to the side of the house, I realised I wasn’t entirely unobserved. Here the hedge gave way to a fence which provided a view of the house next door. I could see a woman watching me surreptitiously from a kitchen window. I decided I’d better call round and enquire about the whereabouts of Mr Longden to establish my bona fides, otherwise my car number would be reported to the police. This definitely looked like a Neighbourhood Watch area.
The woman answered her door promptly, wiping her hands on an apron. She was middle-aged, with a heavy-hipped figure, and the hair straggling over her forehead was starting to turn grey.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for your neighbour, Samuel Longden. Do you happen to know when he’s likely to be at home?’
‘Well, he doesn’t go out much,’ she said cautiously.
‘I’m a friend of his. I’ve got something to return to him.’ I gave her my most reassuring smile, and she seemed to relax a bit.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘But I suppose he might have gone out with his daughter. He sometimes does that. I don’t know what time he might be back. In fact, I haven’t seen him all day, so he might have gone to visit his friend in Cheshire. Did you want to leave anything here for him? I don’t mind.’
‘No, it’s okay. I think I’ll just pop a note through his door.’
‘All right.’
She watched me go back to my car, where I scribbled on a page from my notebook. On one side I wrote: ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with your project. Please contact me to let me know when I can return your files’. I popped the note into an old envelope, folded it over and wrote ‘Samuel Longden’ on the outside. Then I went back to his front door and shoved it through the letter box. As I heard the envelope fall on the mat, I turned and caught a glimpse of the woman next door still watching me.
Turning back into the village, I passed the White Swan pub. This seems to be the name of half the canalside pubs in this part of the world. A little further to the north, the Coventry Canal had once formed a junction with the Ogley and Huddlesford. Working boats would have been constantly passing up and down this stretch of water.
Now, since it was winter, there weren’t even any pleasure boats – just a few ducks nosing around in the overgrown margins or dipping their beaks into the murky water for insects.
That night, Dan Hyde phoned me at home. There was an unfamiliar note of uncertainty in his voice, which rang a warning bell straightaway.
‘Chris. Bad news.’
‘Oh God, what?’
‘Some problems with the start-up. It’s the marketing company. They’re being a bit awkward.’
‘Awkward how?’
‘I had a phone call from their top guy. Basically, they won’t release rights to our brand assets until we pay their invoice. That’s our logos, website design, advertising layouts …’
‘Well, pay the invoice then. What’s the problem, Dan?’
‘The thing is – there’s not much left to pay their invoice with. There’s no revenue yet.’
‘I know that. But that’s what the start-up loan is for – the twenty thousand from the bank. Pay them out of that.’
‘Well …’ Dan suddenly sounded more cheerful. ‘Tell you what, Chris, leave it with me. I dare say we can sort it out. I just thought you ought to know, that’s all. In case you were wondering what was happening.’
‘Okay, mate, you’ve let me know. But it will all be different in a few months’ time, won’t it? We won’t have to go through all this once we get into profit.’
‘Sure,’ said Dan. ‘Sure, it’ll all be different then.’
10
It was only two days later that the letters arrived. It was a Saturday, and I’d stumbled blearily down to a breakfast of cornflakes and coffee rather late, having spent Friday night at the Stowe Arms playing pool with a crowd of regulars. As usual after a night out, my pockets felt lighter and my head several times heavier.
It wasn’t until I was halfway through my second mug of coffee that I started to take notice of the mail I’d picked up as I passed the front door. Mail usually meant bills and bank statements, Reader’s Digest prize draws, and offers of credit cards I couldn’t possibly afford. But this morning there were two items that stood out. They gave off a subtle aura that said ‘read me’ far more effectively than any claims of ‘Important’, ‘Exclusive’ and ‘You may already be a winner’.
The first envelope was long and white, with the address neatly typed, and instead of a stamp it had been passed through a franking machine that left the name of Staffordshire County Council imprinted in the top right hand corner.
With a churning feeling in my stomach, I slit the envelope open using my marmalade knife. It was a terse instruction to attend an appointment with the Human Resources department on a date that was two weeks away, the very day that I was due to return from leave. It didn’t say what the appointment was about. But it didn’t need to.
My brain was reluctant to consider the implications of the first letter just yet, so I turned to the second. The envelope was smaller, and though not exactly used before, it looked faded, as though it had been sitting around for a long time since it was originally bought. My name and address filled most of the front in an unsteady scrawl, and the stamp wasn’t stuck on straight. It was from Samuel Longden, in response to the note I’d pushed through his door two days before.
Though couched in almost formal phrases, his words made his distress obvious. He pleaded with me to reconsider. He hinted at revelations he’d yet to make which would undoubtedly change my mind. He talked about a mysterious disappearance, he repeated his claim of a great injustice. He begged me to meet him one more time, that afternoon at six o’clock in the market square, by the statue of James Boswell.
And he mentioned my grandmother’s name too. Three times, like an incantation. I felt an odd shiver of apprehension when I read it, as if I might turn round and see Mary Buckley herself sitting in the corner of the room, fixing me with that stare.
I looked at the two letters, one in each hand. My brain might not have been working properly, but my hands told me the only thing to do. I dropped the first letter and read Samuel Longden’s again. The only way to avoid thinking about the meeting in two weeks’ time was to concentrate on the meeting today. Six o’clock in the market square?
But no – of course, I couldn’t actually go. The idea was ridiculous.
As it happened, I was a bit early. Dusk was falling, and it was still cold, and I didn’t fancy standing around outside shivering in the wind that blew down Dam Street towards the market square. Nearby in Conduit Street the Earl of Lichfield was already open. I slipped inside and got myself a seat by the window, where I could watch the corner of the square with a pint of bitter in front of me.
Although it had hunting prints on the wall and was right next door to a McDonald’s, the Earl of Lichfield was in the Good Beer Guide, which was enough for me. From the pub, I had a view of the former Corn Exchange. Tucked under its arcade were a series of small shops – Fonebase, Supasnaps, a dry-cleaners, a clock repairers.
The first few sips of the beer made me feel better. The lethargy and muddle-headedness began to pass off as the alcohol seeped through my veins. I started to wonder what on earth I was doing there. A little nagging voice at the back of my brain was telling me I’d already made my judgement on Samuel Longden’s project. So why was I going back on my decision just because an old man was upset about it? Let him find somebody else to help him with his crackpot idea.
An even more insistent voice was starting to remind me that not only was my dubious career as a county council information officer rapidly drawing to a close, but my hopes were pinned entirely on the future success of winningbid.uk.com. Although advertising bookings had been made, all that we had to show for it so far was the sign that had gone up on that empty building on the enterprise park. The reality was that I should be concentrating all my efforts on earning a livelihood, not wasting them humouring an eccentric old man like Samuel when there wasn’t any money in it for me.
The more I drank, the clearer the situation became, and the more obvious it was to me that, if I was ever going to be decisive in my life, the moment was now.
Then I saw the old man arrive. He was walking slowly across the square from the direction of Dr Johnson’s house, moving stiffly with the aid of his stick. He looked older and more infirm than ever, his black overcoat hanging from his body like a loose cape.
He gazed around for a moment, and I could see his breath coming in short puffs in the cold air. For a while, Samuel stayed on his feet. He read the plaques on the buttresses of the old St Mary’s Church. I knew they commemorated four men who’d been burned at the stake in the square, including the last burning in England, that of Edward Wightman in 1612.
Samuel watched a family pass in front of him – the parents laden with shopping bags, their children dragging reluctantly behind. Then he settled himself on a bench directly under the Boswell statue. I looked beyond him to the solid bulk of the cathedral, a monument to nearly thirteen hundred years of Christian belief. Over the centuries it had swollen into an unfathomable Gothic immensity that filled the sky above Lichfield.
Samuel’s arrival had frozen me with indecision again. I’d been on the point of getting up and leaving the pub to meet him on the bench. But my hand had automatically groped for my glass again, and sense returned as the beer touched my lips. I drained the last of my pint and ordered another. Then I sat down to watch the old man, as the dusk gathered and thickened over the city.
He must have been cold sitting there. He tapped the ground with his stick, and looked from right to left, raising his head hopefully every time someone passed. Once or twice he turned and looked directly towards the pub, but I knew he couldn’t see me through the pattern of the glass in the window.
Gradually, the old man stopped hoping. It took over half an hour, but eventually I saw his shoulders slump. He rubbed a hand over his face and sat very still, staring at two children who were playing with the pigeons, chasing them in small, clattering flocks towards Dam Street.
I remained in my seat, barely aware of the increasing activity of the pub around me. I couldn’t walk out into the cold air and end the old man’s misery, yet I was unable to tear myself away from the window and the sight of his distress. My glass stood empty before me on the table, attracting curious stares from the barman and other customers. The street lights had come on, and the market square began to empty.
Finally, Samuel stood up. He moved with difficulty, and the paleness of his face and hands was startling against his black coat in the gloom. He left the square and walked towards the Corn Exchange, pigeons bobbing their heads and weaving round his feet. He moved slowly under the arcade only a few yards from where I sat, past the lighted windows of the clock repairers and the dry-cleaners, past Supasnaps and Fonebase. Two office workers on their way home stepped aside as he approached, recognising his weariness and air of defeat.
I knew why I’d been unable to go outside to meet Samuel. It was because he’d chosen the wrong place for the meeting, a place flooded with history and demands for remembrance. It symbolised what he wanted of me. I’d seen it all too clearly as he had stood and read the inscriptions on the plaques recalling the death of Edward Wightman.
