Drowned Lives

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.

And, of course, there was that photograph. I’d dug it out again, to reassure myself that it existed. George and Samuel, June 1925. If I’d ever seen it before, I couldn’t remember it. But then, I’d never taken much interest, and my father hadn’t been one to reminisce about his family.

It was only my mother who ever brought out the old photos, on the occasions when in-laws were gathered and small huddles of grey heads had formed round the table to smile at the boyish faces of the Buckley men. I could have had no reason for assuming that the Samuel pictured with my grandfather was anything other than a childhood friend. How could I have guessed it was his brother?

I pictured Samuel Longden as I’d last seen him, walking painfully into the dusk on the corner of Conduit Street, pausing perhaps to lean on his stick. In my mind, his face was etched with pain and betrayal. In Castle Dyke, he didn’t hear the car that descended so fast from the ramp of the car park. Perhaps it didn’t have its lights on as it entered the street, and the driver failed to see Samuel in the dark, until it was far too late. I could see the impact of metal on a fragile body, the jerking of limbs, like a dummy tossed into the air. And then followed the sounds, the sickening thump of impacted flesh, the breaking of bones.

By the time Samuel hit the ground he would already be dying or dead, no more than a sack of clothing dropped on the pavement. I thought I heard a tinkle of glass from a shattered headlamp and the revving of an engine that covered a final cry from a dying man’s throat. I smelled the blood from his cracked skull. I could almost feel the agony of his pulverised body. ‘Multiple internal injuries’. An easy phrase to say. Not so easy to understand what it meant.

And then there were the actual memories. That deep, racking cough from someone nearby, the car I’d glimpsed accelerating away, and the street falling quiet. Only Samuel would have remained, still and lifeless, his body broken, his stick smashed in the gutter.

But the picture in my mind wasn’t complete. There were crucial details missing, specific features I couldn’t fill in. Who else had been in that street? What colour was the car, and what make? And whose face had been behind the windscreen?

I called again at the Fosseway restoration site. There was no Waterway Recovery Group work party this weekend, just the usual collection of volunteers, the dedicated few who came out month after month to wield their shovels and trowels.

In the last two weeks a new culvert had been installed to take a brook under the canal below Fosseway Lock. Sections of the old cast iron culvert, full of silt, had been removed, and most of the spoil had been taken to backfill behind the abutment. Several of the massive coping stones from the lock walls had been recovered too. They weighed up to four tonnes each, and it took a crane and a lorry to put them back into position. But there was much more brickwork to be restored.

Today, I could see that a JCB had exposed the footings of the bridge and the water channel. But disaster had struck when lumps of masonry got stuck in one side of the trailer, causing a wheel to sink into the soft ground and the trailer to keel over. A cluster of restoration workers were gathered round trying to free it from the quagmire.

One of the ways the Trust had been raising money was through a scheme for supporters to sponsor the steel pilings that strengthened the bank. The piles were stamped with the names of sponsors. I ran my eye over a few while I waited. They said ‘Emma and Sam’, ‘Panzer Cat’, ‘Tony’s Pile’ and ‘The Woollibotts’. A working party had been using a borrowed piling hammer, and claimed to have driven seventy-five piles in a single weekend.

Andrew Hadfield was among the workers, with a hard hat pushed high on his head. I finally managed to attract his attention from behind the safety fence and beckoned him over.

‘Andrew, I’ve got something I’d like you to have a look at.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s in my car. Can you spare a minute?’

‘This sounds interesting.’

We sat in the Escort, and I took the box off the back seat and placed it in his lap. Since my visit to the solicitor’s office on Friday, I’d spent what seemed like hours staring at that box and wondering whether I should smash it open. I’d even brought a hammer and chisel from the garage with the intention of starting the job. But I’d laid the tools down again. I couldn’t bring myself to damage the perfect grain in the wood, or to destroy something that had lasted intact for so long. It would have felt like sacrilege.

‘Mmm.’ Andrew lifted the box, turned it over, stroked his hand against the grain of the wood and stared at the three keyholes. ‘I suppose if you just turn the one key... no, I didn’t think it would.’

‘We tried that,’ I said.

‘We?’ he asked, cocking an eyebrow.

‘A... friend of mine has looked at it too.’

‘No, you’d need all three keys,’ said Andrew. ‘That’s the whole point. That’s why it was made like this.’

‘What do you mean? What is it?’

‘A canal proprietors’ box. It’s the sort of thing they used for keeping valuable items in, like deeds or share certificates, or the company seal.’

‘Would that be valuable?’

‘Of course. The wax seal was what made a document legally binding. Possession of the seal meant financial power. So the seal and its stamp were kept in a box like this, with three locks, which meant three proprietors had to be present to open it. They would each have their own individual key, you see.’

‘It sounds as though they didn’t trust each other very much.’

‘Trust each other? The canal companies were rife with jealousy and rivalry, not to mention the opportunity for dishonesty and misappropriation of funds. You must know the history of some of these companies. The Ogley and Huddlesford had its fair share of disputes and scandals, but it was no worse than many others.’

Andrew hefted the box and shook it gently. ‘No impressor in there, though. In fact, it seems to be empty.’

‘That’s what I thought, too.’

‘An interesting curio,’ said Andrew, handing the box back. ‘If it still had its contents, it would be a real treasure.’

‘And the keys, I suppose.’

‘Well, to have all three keys with it would be a real achievement. Bearing in mind they’d be in the possession of three separate people. This box was deliberately made difficult to open.’

He looked at me as I returned the box carefully to the back seat. ‘Are you going to try to find the other keys, Chris?’

‘How would I do that?’

He laughed. ‘I have no idea.’

I didn’t tell Andrew there was another key in my pocket, and I’d already checked that it fitted the box. I’d decided there were some things I should keep to myself. I could harbour a secret too. I had a good teacher in that art. But, as for a third key, I couldn’t begin to imagine where I would look. I could sense that it might become an obsession, if I let it.

‘I wonder where he got the box?’ I said thoughtfully.

‘Who?’

‘Samuel Longden.’

‘Is that where it came from? Well, well. He was a curious old man in lots of ways.’

‘What do you know about him?’

‘No more than anyone else. But there’s been a lot of talk about him since he died. It seems everyone knew his name on the Birmingham Navigations and the Trent and Mersey, not to mention further afield. Boaters like to gossip when they’re tied up together. You should see them rattling away to each other at a rally. Did you know the boaters called Samuel “The Captain”?’

‘No.’

‘Well, the old Captain was a bit of a character apparently. Eccentric, even. That sort of person always attracts a bit of talk.’

‘Had you met him before?’

‘Not until he started turning up to watch the work parties. They say he’d been off the water for a few years. Couldn’t cope with a boat on his own any more, I suppose, at his age. They call it “having moss on the fender”.’

‘Did you ever come across his daughter?’

‘No. Never met her.’

‘Not many people seem to have.’

Andrew regarded me quizzically. ‘Did Samuel Longden take his project seriously, then? The book business?’

‘It looks as though he did,’ I said.

‘And you? Are you taking it seriously, Chris?’

But I didn’t know the answer to that one.