Drowned Lives

23

Chasetown seemed to consist of one main road with a few shops and pubs. Streets of housing backed on to a trading estate with a Goodyear tyre factory and a new Safeway supermarket. Beyond them lay an expanse of heathland on the edge of Chasewater itself.

I turned past Chasetown Football Club’s ground into a neighbourhood of small bungalows, with bare trellises on their front walls and dark conifers in their back gardens. A man was walking a dog, and children were playing in the yard of a school.

Number thirty-four was a brick bungalow exactly like all the others. It had an open garage to one side, with a brightly polished blue Vauxhall Cavalier parked inside. There was a neat lawn, lined by flowerbeds planted with severely pruned rose bushes. In February, it looked damp and dead and devoid of colour. The bungalow itself was built in the 1970s or 80s, with white woodwork and an imitation cartwheel propped outside the bay window.

Sally Chaplin answered the bell. She had her shoes and coat on, ready to go out, and she didn’t look pleased to see me.

‘I don’t know why you want to talk to Frank,’ she said. ‘I really don’t.’

‘It was Frank who wanted to talk to me,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, as far as I can see, he’s just using it as an excuse to stay at home and get out of helping me with the shopping.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disrupt your arrangements.’

‘We always go shopping on Saturday morning,’ she said.

‘Perhaps I should come back another time.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. You’d better come in.’

I stepped onto a hallway carpet that smelled of Shake ’n’ Vac, and stood near an imitation mahogany hall table while Sally shouted into a back room.

‘Frank! He’s here. And I’m off now.’

‘Will you manage all right, love?’ Frank’s voice drifted towards us from a distance.

‘I’ll have to, won’t I?’

‘Sorry.’

‘You might as well go on through,’ she said to me. ‘You’ll find him in the conservatory, of course.’

Frank was watering a row of geraniums that were thriving in an atmosphere that verged on the tropical. The bungalow itself had been warm, but in the conservatory the heat and humidity made my skin prickle. There were cacti on shelves along one side, and trays full of seedlings under plastic sheets dripping with moisture. The air smelled of water and damp soil, and that pungent, fruity scent peculiar to geranium leaves. Many of the plants were in abundant flower, despite the season, and their sprawling colours were in startling contrast to the regimented aridity of the front garden.

‘This is my territory,’ said Frank. ‘Sally says the plants attract flies. Not to mention spiders. But it’s all part of nature, isn’t it?’

‘I gather I’m keeping you from the shopping.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t worry about that. She’d much rather do it without me. She just likes to make a point.’

‘Well, thanks for giving me your time.’

‘Well, we’re almost relatives, aren’t we? In a way.’

‘I suppose so.’

He smiled at my hesitation. ‘But who’d want any more of those?’

‘You’re Alison Longden’s son from a previous marriage. Am I right?’

‘That’s it. I was ten when Mum and Dad got divorced. I didn’t much like the thought that mum had another baby and it wasn’t my real sister. I felt jealous, I suppose. You know what teenagers are like.’

He stroked the leaves of a big pelargonium with pink flowers that he’d just finished watering. He was looking at it as he might have done at a favourite pet. I didn’t suppose there was a cat or a dog in the house. Too much mess.

‘After a while, we lost touch,’ he said. ‘I decided I was going to live my own life, as you do at that age. Then there was the accident.’

‘The car crash.’

‘It was a tragedy. She was a good woman. Everyone liked her. Old Samuel was devastated.’

Frank replaced his watering can under a tap and dusted his hands.

‘It was Samuel I wanted to talk to you about really, Frank,’ I said.

‘Yes. You must have a lot of questions.’

‘Could we go into the house? It’s a bit too warm in here for me.’

‘Sally says so too. Actually, I thought we might go for a walk. Down by the reservoir. We can get a breath of fresh air.’

‘Whatever you like.’

We turned the corner from Cop Nook Lane into a road that came down past the football ground. From here, the heath stretched to the reservoir, with narrow footpaths skirting the edge of the water and winding up and down sandy slopes that were thick with clumps of gorse.

‘This is a peaceful sort of place,’ I said.

‘At times,’ said Frank. ‘But you wouldn’t want to come here at weekends in the summer. It’s full of kids taking drugs and having sex, and God knows what. You can’t move without tripping over them in every hollow.’

The wind stirred the empty husks of seed pods on the branches of the gorse, causing a dry rattling sound all around us. The noise made me feel uneasy. It was like the rustle of surreptitious movements in the undergrowth, or a hundred snakes slithering over pebbles.

‘No one here now, though,’ said Frank. ‘They don’t bother coming when it’s cold.’

Across an inlet I could see small yachts pulled up onto the shore, their masts folded down onto their decks. In the summer the water would be thick with boats, and the light railway would be running on the opposite bank, while crowds flocked to the amusement park at the southern end of the reservoir. The Anglesey branch of the Wyrley and Essington Canal still linked Chasewater to Ogley Junction. That short branch had once been the feeder to provide water from the reservoir to the Ogley and Huddlesford. Unlike the Ogley, the feeder was still there, and it was in water too.

‘But you don’t mind the weather, Frank?’ I said.

‘I think it’s bracing. It clears your mind. That helps you think.’

‘Helps you remember too, perhaps?’

‘Oh, I don’t need any help doing that.’

There was a great scar in the earth between the reservoir and the town, and to the north I could see the remains of a vast tip from an abandoned quarry. The line of an old mineral railway could still be followed, where its embankment had once taken it right across the reservoir. The walls and chimneys of the trading estate rose behind us, and the constant buzz of distant traffic reminded me of the proximity of the main Cannock Road. Despite the expanse of heath, nature was a relative stranger here. We were surrounded by the ineradicable signs of industry. The rattling of the gorse was no more than a pitiful gesture of defiance.

‘Shall I start with my first questions?’ I asked, when Frank had been silent for a while.

He seemed to wake from his thoughts and plucked a twig full of seed pods from a branch. Still he didn’t meet my eye.

‘I said I knew there must be a lot of questions you wanted to ask. But I must warn you, I might not have the answers to give you.’

‘At least let’s try, now we’re here.’

‘If there’s anything I can tell you that will help.’

‘You know about the rift in my family, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I picked up on it in my early teens. I suppose I must have heard people talking about it. I can’t remember now if it was my mum or my dad. It certainly wasn’t Samuel. He never spoke about his family at all. There were none of them at the wedding, though of course it was only a register office affair. That alone was enough to cause people to talk.’

‘He was calling himself Longden already by then.’

‘Oh yes. I never knew him as a Buckley at all. In fact, it was Caroline who told me, when we went to see her after Samuel died. It was a bit of a surprise. But then Samuel had always been a surprising man.’

‘You must have learned something about his past?’

‘There were some things he talked about. What particularly did you want to know?’

‘Anything, Frank, anything. Remember I didn’t even know of his existence until a couple of weeks ago.’

He pursed his lips and rested his back against a tree. ‘Strange that. A bit hard to believe.’

‘I find it difficult to believe myself. But it’s true. His history is almost a complete blank to me. I know he made a lot of money in the brewery business.’

‘That’s right. He inherited a brewery in Lichfield from some old chap he worked for. Business picked up again after the war. Then he sold out to one of the big Burton breweries in the late 1960s, when things were really booming. He made a packet, by all accounts.’

‘He would still only have been in his fifties then,’ I said.

‘I reckon he kept himself busy using his money to make more. Some people have that knack, don’t they? Not me, though.’

‘What do you mean? Investments?’

‘He certainly talked about the stock market as if he knew what he was doing. But he had other interests as well.’

‘The inland waterways, for example.’

Frank sniffed. ‘I never understood what he saw in that myself. But yes, he bought himself a boat, didn’t he? A narrowboat.’

‘Yes, Kestrel.’

‘I know those things don’t come cheap.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen it. I’d guess maybe seventy or eighty thousand quid’s worth.’

His eyebrows shot up in amazement. ‘Really? That much? It’s almost what my bungalow is worth.’

‘He must have been serious about it.’

Frank nodded sourly. ‘Somebody as wealthy as that — well, money doesn’t mean to them what it does to us. They spend those sort of amounts on a whim.’

‘But this wasn’t a whim of Samuel’s. Not from what the vicar said at his funeral service. And all those boaters who went...’

‘No, you’re right. He was keen. I think he spent less time with the boat after he married my mother. She took his attention for a while, and then Caroline came along.’

‘Alison meant a lot to him, Frank.’

He pulled himself away from the tree and began to walk again, following the curving path. ‘I know she did. It destroyed him when Mum was killed in the crash. But at least he had Caroline. She was seventeen when Mum died.’

‘A difficult age. Especially for an old man to deal with.’

‘He was seventy-three when it happened. You’d have thought it might have finished him off. But Caroline became the centre of his life. Her and Kestrel anyway. He took her on the boat with him all over the place.’

‘I remember the boaters saying that. They knew him as the Captain. I suppose it was a mark of respect.’

Frank hesitated. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But I always thought it came from his wartime service.’

I frowned. The Second World War was a very long time ago, and it hardly seemed relevant. There were more immediate things that I needed to know about.

‘When did he develop this idea about the book?’

‘That I don’t know.’

‘But you knew he was working on it.’

‘I knew he was working on something. But you could never tell with Samuel what it might be next. He was a bit unpredictable, especially after Mum died. He was never quite the same.’

‘Old people do get more eccentric. But I know what you mean — he tended to go off at a tangent at a moment’s notice.’

‘Like I say, he was a surprising man. You, too, Chris. Perhaps you take after him.’

‘Me? How am I surprising?’

‘Well, for a start, you turned up at Samuel’s funeral, large as life. We never expected you to, not after what Caroline said about you. We felt sure you’d stay away. But no, you faced it out. I’m not sure I’d have been brave enough to do that, knowing that people were talking about me behind my back.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘Well, you know the way they do.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘And you didn’t stay in the background either. We seemed to see you everywhere, mingling with the other mourners. And then, in the end, you even talked to Caroline.’

‘She had nothing good to say to me.’

‘Still. That was what made me think you might be determined enough to see this thing through. A lot of people wouldn’t. Me, for one. But you, Chris... I have a feeling you won’t be stopped from going on with Samuel’s book.’

‘Would you want to stop me?’

‘If I thought I could, yes. I’d try to persuade you, but I don’t think you’d take much notice of me.’

‘It would depend on what your reasons were.’

‘There you are, you see. If I told you that, there’d be no point in trying to stop you.’

I frowned again, more puzzled by the minute at his attitude.

‘In any case,’ he said, ‘there are others who’ll try harder to stop the book. Much harder.’

I turned at a sudden rattling of the gorse bushes that was so loud I thought a crowd of football supporters were rushing down the slope. But it was only the east wind getting up, chilly gusts that stirred the water on the shoreline. We reached a small, sheltered pool and crossed a causeway of stone slabs set into the water. Something splashed into a dark corner of the pool. A moorhen maybe, or a water rat.

‘Frank, there’s nothing in Samuel’s book that anybody could possibly worry about being published,’ I said.

He stopped abruptly in front of me, making me lose my balance slightly on the causeway and dip my foot in the shallow water. It was very cold.

‘Isn’t there?’ he demanded, and watched my face intently.

‘No.’

He relaxed and turned away. He mumbled something to himself. It sounded like, ‘He might have changed his mind then.’

‘It’s a history,’ I insisted. ‘A hundred or two hundred years old. Ancient stuff. It just happens to be about Samuel’s ancestors. And mine.’

‘All right, all right.’

‘But I didn’t come to talk about the book. I want to ask you about Samuel. What caused the rift between him and my grandfather? Why did he change his name? Why didn’t I know he existed until it was too late?’

He carried on walking, loping easily up the embankment with his back to me.

‘Frank!’ I shouted. ‘Why?’

He turned then at the top of the slope, his thin figure outlined against the grey sky, with his sparse hair lifting untidily as the wind plucked at him.

‘I can’t help you, Chris. I know nothing about that.’

His attitude really made me angry. It had been his idea for me to come to Chasetown. He’d led me on, and he couldn’t let me down now.

‘Can’t or won’t?’ I said. But he didn’t answer. His gaze drifted away from me, out towards Chasewater again. But there was nothing out there for him to see. ‘What are you frightened of, Frank?’

He shook his head and turned to descend the far side of the banking. I scrambled after him and ran a few yards until I caught him up and laid my hand on his shoulder. We were looking down on the streets of Chasetown, spread out before us.

‘Tell me. I need to know.’

‘There’s nothing for me to worry about, if all you’re writing is history. But if you’re digging up secrets that ought to stay buried, then we’ve both got plenty to be frightened of. If that’s the case, then don’t try to involve me and Sally. We don’t want to know. I’m only telling you what I told Samuel.’

Frank seemed calmer now as we walked along the embankment, back towards the football ground and the car park.

‘What did Samuel tell you about the book?’

‘Not much.’

‘He must have told you something to make you so worried. But there’s nothing in the manuscript to concern yourself about. There’s nothing about anybody living, even.’

As we approached the road, we saw Sally pass in the Cavalier on her way back to Cop Nook Lane. The back seat of the car was stacked with Safeway carrier bags.

‘Fine. Let it stay that way then. Let the dead stay dead. Don’t try to dig them up.’ Frank’s eyes followed the Cavalier as it disappeared. ‘I think it would be better if I didn’t invite you back inside. Sally, you know...’

‘No problem, Frank. Thanks for talking to me anyway.’

He caught the sarcastic tone. ‘I know I haven’t been much help. You’ll have to find someone else to answer your questions.’

‘But there isn’t anybody else left.’

‘Except Caroline.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s Caroline.’

He hesitated for a moment before we parted. Then he surprised me by sticking out his hand to shake mine, as if we were two businessmen sealing a successful deal. It was a firm, warm grip, and in a strange way it reassured me. It made me feel I was in real communication with another human being who understood me. It made me believe, for once, that I wasn’t completely alone.