Drowned Lives

19

In the centre of Hopwas were two pubs, situated on either side of the canal close to the Lichfield Road bridge. On one side stood the black and white Tame Otter, and on the other the Red Lion, both with tables set out in beer gardens on the canalside. There was a small wharf at the bottom of the Red Lion’s garden, where a smart red and green narrowboat waited, its brasswork gleaming. I realised then what was going to be unusual about Great-Uncle Samuel’s funeral.

A small crowd of people in dark clothes were milling around the beer garden, moving in slow, automatic patterns like feeding crows, silent and uneasy. Some of them turned to stare at me as I walked down the steps to join them. They noted my black suit and tie, saw that I was one of their group, and promptly ignored me.

According to a sign on the cabin, the boat had been hired from Streethay Wharf. Samuel Longden’s coffin had already been carried from the hearse that stood above us on the road, and now it rested on the flat roof of the boat, secured with white cotton lines to rails that ran the full length on either side. The funeral director’s men were gathered round the coffin, checking it was secure. Then they began placing flowers around it in great heaps of colour, piling them up until the boat was like a floating garden.

‘He’d really like to have gone on Kestrel,’ said someone nearby, ‘but nobody is sure whether it’s in good enough condition.’

There was no one there that I knew, except for Samuel’s neighbour, Mrs Wentworth. She was dressed in a black coat and a strange little hat, and she was accompanied by a fat, bald man who might have been Mr Wentworth. She caught my eye, but looked away without acknowledging me. Everywhere there seemed to be dark backs and unfamiliar faces turned away from me, and the atmosphere was thoroughly depressing. I glanced longingly at the back door of the pub, but it was only ten o’clock and the bar wasn’t open yet.

I began a slow prowl towards the bank of the canal, searching for someone who might be a relative. Samuel’s daughter Caroline must be here, surely. She would have flown back from Australia as soon as she heard of her father’s death. But I had no idea what she looked like, or even how old she might be.

And what other relatives might be gathered that I didn’t know about? Maybe I was getting paranoid, but everyone I looked at bore an imagined resemblance to a Buckley. And every one of them turned away from me or stared right through me, dismissing me as an intrusive stranger.

The funeral director was taking charge now, calling people together in a courteous but insistent tone, with the manner of a man used to being in control at such occasions. He was ushering mourners onto the boat via a short wooden gangplank leading into the saloon, where tables and bench seats were installed as if in a railway carriage or a motorway restaurant.

And now it was a simple matter of observation to see that the man was paying particular attention to a black-clad woman and her companion, urging them to take their places at the front of the saloon. As far as I could tell, the woman was about thirty years old, tall and dark-haired. She wore a suit with a knee-length skirt that was a little too tight to allow her to descend the steps into the boat gracefully. Holding her arm was a tall man with a heavy jaw and deep-set eyes, who looked at everyone with the same expression of contempt. At least it wasn’t just me, then. But the one glimpse I caught of his dark eyes made me recoil instinctively, as if I’d turned over a damp stone and found something awful squirming underneath it.

I joined the throng of people and ducked as I stepped down into the boat. The saloon was lined with small windows for sight-seeing trips. Behind me was another door, which led into the rear cabin and out onto the stern counter, where a steerer stood with his hand on the tiller. He was dressed in mourning clothes like everyone else, though whether he was a genuine mourner or an employee of the funeral director, I couldn’t tell.

The woman I took to be Caroline Longden was at the front, with a small group gathered protectively round her. From her age, I reckoned old Samuel must have been well into his fifties when she was born. But wasn’t that what he’d said? That he’d married late in life? It occurred to me that, as a relative of the deceased, I should perhaps be at the front too, near the chief mourners. But I knew none of these people. They could all be relatives, for all I knew. This wasn’t the time to push myself forward where I might be unwelcome.

I settled instead for a place near the stern, where two middle-aged couples joined me. They obviously knew each other, and I sensed they were people for whom Samuel Longden’s death was not a great personal loss. Friends, then. Neighbours or acquaintances, perhaps, or even former employees. The man nearest me was wearing one of those peaked caps, like a weekend yachtsman. Although it was black, it looked strangely jocular and out of place, even on a boat.

Soon the diesel engine burst into life and churned the water under the stern, and we were under way. Across the canal, at the Tame Otter, and along the bridge above us, people had gathered to watch the boat move off. Some had cameras to capture the moment. As Mr Elsworth had predicted, it was a novel occasion.

From the bridge, we emerged into bright winter sunshine. There were private gardens on either side of the canal until we passed a small landing stage and moved underneath a line of silver birch trees stretching towards Hopwas School Bridge. The smell of garlic wafted from a moored narrowboat, and two children stopped their bikes on the towpath to stare and point at us.

Within a few more yards we’d passed out of Hopwas altogether into a rural stretch of canal, where the silence around us was palpable. The River Tame ran close to the canal, and woods rose to the west. According to a sign, this was the furthest reach of the firing range at Whittington Barracks. Another danger area.

Two swans with tags on their legs followed the boat under the next bridge. They eyed us malevolently and hissed at us quietly through orange beaks. The arch of the bridge was low, and sunlight reflected off the water onto its lichen-covered bricks. Past the bridge, the trees were different. They had rough bark, and their branches divided low on their trunks to reach out across the water. The passage of the boat set up slow ripples that spread out behind us and nudged the banks, stirring the weeds and disturbing a moorhen. A cool breeze sprang up on the open section of canal. Petals slipped from the wreaths and drifted onto the water like confetti.

The journey to Whittington took about forty-five minutes. As soon as the novelty of the boat had begun to wear off, I was able to study the other mourners closely. No doubt they studied me too. From a galley near the stem of the boat, a woman in an apron served us with cups of tea and biscuits, and the atmosphere became more relaxed, as it does on these occasions when refreshments arrive. The people sitting near me began to eye me curiously.

‘So how did you know the Captain?’ said the man with the cap, after the tea had done its job.

‘I’m a relative.’

‘Oh?’

They looked at each other, but carefully avoided looking at Caroline’s party.

‘His great-nephew.’

‘I see. Were you close?’

‘No, we hadn’t seen each other until recently.’

‘He was a grand chap,’ said one of the women, her hat swaying as she nodded.

‘The best,’ said the other. ‘No edge to him at all. He always had a friendly word for everyone he met. And he must have met plenty of people in his time.’

‘Everyone knew the Captain.’

Now I had them placed. They were boaters, Samuel’s fellow waterways enthusiasts, turning out to pay their respects. They introduced themselves as Eric and Barbara, Malcolm and Margaret.

‘A few years ago the Captain was up and down this bit of canal all the time,’ said Eric. ‘He went everywhere. Braunston, onto the Oxford, down to the Trent and Mersey and the Grand Union.’

‘There were still working boats on those canals until the late 1960s, maybe a bit later,’ I said.

‘He liked that.’ Eric smiled at me. ‘The Captain was a pleasure boater himself, of course. But he was disappointed when the working boats stopped. Of course, trade just died out. They couldn’t compete any more.’

‘Sometimes he had the girl with him too,’ said Barbara.

We all looked towards Caroline. She wasn’t a girl any more. She looked mature and calm, and very much in control. The black suited her — it gave her an air of elegance and sophistication that made her stand out from those around her.

‘Ah, but he hadn’t been boating for a while.’

‘A few years, certainly.’

‘What made him stop?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know.’

‘Old age probably.’

‘But he kept up his interest in the waterways.’

‘Oh, he put a lot of money into them.’

‘Yes, you could always count on him when it was needed.’

Their eyes turned on me again, openly speculative now. ‘He had plenty of money, didn’t he? The Captain?’ one said.

I managed a non-committal shrug.

‘I suppose it goes to the girl,’ said Eric, studying the back of Caroline’s head as she delicately chewed on a biscuit.

‘I believe so,’ I said. ‘Most of it, anyway.’

They watched me, waiting for me to continue. A residue of funeral decorum held them back from interrogating me about my relationship to the rest of the family and exactly how much I was going to gain from Samuel Longden’s will.

‘Do you recognise any of the other people here?’ I asked. ‘Apart from Caroline.’

Eric indicated discreetly with the peak of his cap. ‘Those two in the corner. Their name’s Chaplin.’

‘Frank and Sally,’ said Barbara. ‘I was speaking to them earlier on.’

‘Some sort of relatives, aren’t they?’

‘He’s Caroline’s half-brother.’

‘Ah, he’d be the son of Samuel’s wife from her first marriage,’ said Eric.

‘She died, you know. In a car crash,’ Margaret told me in a hushed voice.

‘What about Caroline’s companion?’

‘I think he’s her boyfriend,’ said Eric doubtfully.

‘It’s Simon something,’ said Malcolm. ‘I heard her call him Simon.’

‘Do you know his last name?’

Margaret moved across the aisle and held a whispered conversation with another couple. ‘His name’s Simon Monks,’ she said when she came back. ‘And he’s not her boyfriend, he’s her fiancé. They’re getting married.’

We passed a farm and a scatter of buildings. A pair of carriages rattled by on the railway line from Lichfield to Tamworth as we approached the level crossing at Hademore. The canal took a swing to the west, following the contours of the land towards the rifle ranges on the heath, and running alongside the road as far as Whittington Bridge.

From here, although there was no obvious change in the waterway, I knew it reverted to the Coventry Canal from the stretch of Birmingham and Fazeley we’d been on. This was the detached portion of the Coventry, an anomaly left by a dispute between rival companies that had rumbled on for years.

‘Not far now,’ said one of the canal people.

Cups and plates were being cleared away. Visits were made to the toilets somewhere ahead of the galley. Gradually, the party remembered what it was assembled for. Some of us had forgotten what was carried on the roof, until we passed the sewage works and chugged along close to the houses in Whittington. People came out of their back doors to watch us, and an old man walking his dog on the towpath shouted to the steerer to ask whose funeral it was.

Word seemed to spread through the village. By the time we tied up at the moorings near Burton Road, there was a crowd on the roadside, almost blocking the traffic. They stood in the garden of a pub, right among the play equipment and a grotesque plastic tree with a twisted human face like something out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Next to the pub was a pair of old lock gates set into the ground and a sign that said ‘Whittington Lock’. But there had never been any locks on the Coventry Canal, so these gates had come from somewhere else.

Whittington Wharf was just below the bridge. It was only a private house really, with a shed in the garden labelled ‘site office’. But there was a landing place where space had been left for the funeral boat to tie up.

We waited while the men carefully lifted the coffin from the roof. The boat rocked in the water when it was relieved of the weight. They carried the coffin up the path to the road, where the hearse waited, then came back for the flowers as we all disembarked via the gangplank, smoothing our clothes self-consciously and casting our eyes down under the barrage of curious stares from the bridge. A policeman was on duty to halt the traffic and allow the hearse and funeral cars to move off. I found myself crammed into the second black limousine with the Chaplins and an unidentified old lady who’d spoken to no one.

Frank Chaplin was a narrow-shouldered man in his forties with curly ginger hair starting to recede from his forehead. He had a wispy moustache and a tendency to smile without showing his teeth, which made him look as though he was smirking. Every few minutes he shot back the over-long cuff of his black suit to look at his wristwatch. His wife Sally was dark-haired, with a generously built body restrained in a tight grey skirt and jacket.

‘It’s going to take all day,’ said Sally, leaning across the seats to me as if she suddenly felt she’d known me all her life. ‘Did you realise that? I’ve never heard of a funeral taking so long. Frank has had to take an entire day off work.’

‘I suppose we could sneak off after the service.’

‘No, we can’t,’ said Frank mournfully. ‘We’ve left our car at Hopwas, haven’t we?’

‘That’s a point. So have I. Perhaps we could ask the funeral director to phone for a taxi, and we could share it.’

Frank and Sally looked askance at the old lady, who seemed to be falling asleep. ‘We can’t do that. Obviously, it wouldn’t be respectful.’

‘To whom?’

‘Caroline would be offended.’

‘Ah yes. We don’t want to upset Caroline, do we?’

Sally looked nervous. ‘She seems a bit cool at times, but she’s quite nice when you get to know her.’

I wondered who the old lady was. It would be just my luck if she was Caroline Longden’s aunt, who said nothing but heard everything and had a perfect memory. The Chaplins seemed nervous of her — but perhaps they had no idea who she was either.

‘Do you know Caroline well?’ I asked.

‘She’s Frank’s half-sister,’ said Sally, as if it answered my question.

Frank looked a bit rebellious as we turned the corner at the crossroads in Whittington. ‘She’s a class above us,’ he said. ‘She moves in different circles, if you know what I mean.’

Sally hushed him. ‘She’s away a lot,’ she said. ‘She never wanted to stay in this area. But Samuel was different. He was a lovely old man.’

‘No edge to him at all. So they say.’

‘That’s right.’

The hearse was slowing as it approached the parish church of St Giles. I saw a square tower with a small spire and a building in a hotchpotch of styles.

‘Did you know about Samuel’s project?’ I asked. ‘The book he wanted to publish?’

It was a stab in the dark. But I’d rarely seen anyone’s face change as quickly as Frank Chaplin’s did. He went very white, the blood draining out of his cheeks in a dramatic contrast to his black suit. He stared me at, horrified. Sally noticed his reaction, but was more composed. She reached out to grasp his hand on the seat.

‘A book?’ Frank said. ‘What was it about?’

‘Oh, the history of the Buckley family,’ I said casually, trying to hide my curiosity. ‘I’m carrying on the project for him, actually. Perhaps I could come and see you some time? There might be a few things you could help me with.’

The cars had stopped, and the doors were opened before Frank or Sally could reply. The old lady was helped out first, then the Chaplins. I saw Frank jump as the folding seat I’d been sitting on banged back into place. No doubt about it — he was definitely nervous all of a sudden. Very interesting.

We arranged ourselves into a ragged file and trooped through the churchyard to the porch. Sally passed me, offering her hand to the old lady to help her up the step. I felt a tap on my shoulder, and Frank’s voice close to my ear.

‘Come and see us at the weekend,’ he said. ‘Saturday would be a good day. Thirty-four Cop Nook Lane, Chasetown. We’re in the phone book.’

I nodded, and the next moment we were in the dimness of the church, with a tune playing on the organ. We shuffled into the pews, and I saw that many of the seats were already full for the service.

The funeral held still more surprises for me. For a start, the vicar actually seemed to know the man he was eulogising. This was unlike the service for my father, when the clergyman had asked me for a list of facts to refer to, and had read them out like a bad actor stumbling over his lines.

The man at Whittington wasn’t the incumbent of St Giles, I was told. Yet he spoke of Great-Uncle Samuel as if he’d been an old friend, talking of his successful brewery business, his love of the waterways, his boat Kestrel and the tragedy in his life when his wife Alison was killed. He offered sympathy to Caroline, and gave us the usual line about not being there to mourn a man’s death, but to celebrate his life.

Later, an elderly man with a red face and a large moustache got up and talked about Samuel Longden’s exploits on the waterways. He treated us to anecdotes about the days when Samuel was a novice boater and had wedged his boat firmly sideways across the canal and later grounded it on a weir for three days. He also told a complicated story in which the Captain left his windlass slotted onto the paddle spindle, then nearly sank his boat through a badly fitted weed hatch, whatever that was. He struck just the right note for the members of the congregation behind me, who seemed to be boaters to a man and woman.

The speaker went on to list examples of Samuel’s generosity, both to individuals and to causes he thought were worth supporting, including the restoration of the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal, to which he’d quietly contributed large sums of money for a number of years. He ended with a reference to the South Staffordshire Link Road and how Samuel Longden would feel if it was allowed to go ahead and sever the line of the canal. This brought murmurs of approval from around the church, and roused the congregation to a fine pitch by the time the coffin was carried out.

The time we spent at the actual graveside was mercifully short. Samuel went from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, in the way of all burials. Nobody commented on how ironic it was that a man who had been so concerned with water should be committed to the earth.

But there was one thing that struck home to me, as it did for no one else there. It was something that left me confused about my feelings. For here I was at the funeral of my great-uncle, and I was supposed to be mourning the passing of a relative. Yet the name on the headstone was Longden. At no time during the service did anyone mention this fact — that the man known as Samuel Longden was actually a Buckley.